Development of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission

Abstract

WISE is a NASA MIDEX mission to survey the entire sky in four bands from 3 to 25 microns with sensitivity about 500 times greater than the IRAS survey. WISE will find the most luminous galaxies in the universe, find the closest stars to the Sun, and detect most of the main belt asteroids larger than 3 km. WISE launch is scheduled in November, 2009 on a Delta 7320-10 to a 525 km Sun-synchronous polar orbit.This paper gives an overview of WISE including development status and management approach. WISE flight system design is single string with selected redundancy and graceful degradation. Wherever possible, design heritage from prior missions is pursued and properly reviewed to reduce development time and cost. Further risk reduction is achieved since the WISE spacecraft has no deployable mechanisms and no propulsion. Nonetheless, a complex space mission with a sophisticated cryogenic IR telescope such as WISE demands a partnership of multiple organizations in government research, academia, and industry. With a cost cap and relatively short development schedule, it is essential for all WISE partners to work seamlessly together. This is accomplished by a single management team representing all key partners and disciplines in science, systems engineering, mission assurance, project and contract management. WISE uses a variety of management tools including frequent team interaction, schedule, milestone and critical path analysis, risk analysis, reliability analysis, earned value analysis, configuration management, and management of schedule and budget reserves. After a successful mission critical design review in June, 2007, WISE has completed building most of the flight hardware, and started integration and test within payload and spacecraft.

Characterization of flight detector arrays for the wide-field infrared survey explorer

“…1,2,3 Scheduled for launch in November, 2009, WISE will conduct an all-sky survey in the wavelength range from 2.8 to 26 microns with sensitivity up to three orders of magnitude beyond that achieved in 1983 by the IRAS survey. Science goals for WISE include a wide variety of studies ranging from the discovery of the nearest star to our Sun to the detection of the most luminous galaxies in the universe.…”

Quantifying the Impact of Spectral Coverage on the Retrieval of Molecular Abundances from Exoplanet Transmission Spectra

“…As indicated by the simulations we present here, this spectral resolution is sufficient to make precise abundance measurements of CO, CO 2 , CH 4 , and H 2 O (see Section 4). We adopt a telescope primary mirror diameter of 0.4 m with negligible attenuation; this mirror size was chosen to reflect the design of the successful WISE telescope (Liu et al 2008;Wright et al 2010). The use of a high-throughput prism spectrograph and the availability of bright transiting exoplanet targets, both currently-known and those predicted to be discovered with NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS; Sullivan et al 2015), make this telescope size viable for atmospheric characterization.…”

A new window on the cosmos: The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA)

“…The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE; Liu et al, 2008) is a very sensitive 3.3-23 lm all sky survey that will be launched just as SOFIA begins operations. SOFIA can provide a number of important follow-up observations.…”