Hitchhiking through the galaxies

BOULDER – Think your job is hard? Try this one: Map the universe.

That’s the task Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder has chosen to take on through a program dubbed WISE, or Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer. This NASA-funded project is designed to collect a wealth of knowledge about our solar system, the Milky Way and the universe via an unmanned satellite carrying an infrared, super-sensitive telescope.

Described as a powerful set of night vision goggles, the explorer will be able to survey the sky with 500 times more sensitivity than previous infrared missions. Officials say it’ll give astronomers and other scientists information they can use for decades to come.

After eight years of study, NASA officially confirmed WISE this fall. The launch is scheduled for November 2009. The mission will last seven months, and cost about $320 million. The satellite will orbit the Earth and operate for at least seven months, with data expected a few times a day. About 30 Ball Aerospace employees are working on the project.

Roz Brown, a spokeswoman for Ball Aerospace, says the project emerged when NASA chose Ball in April 2003 as a team member to develop the explorer for missions. Ball will provide the spacecraft, flight system integration and test, and support of launch and mission operations for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The laboratory will manage the mission.

“The scope is designed to provide a full sky, infrared map and should provide a map of objects too cool to see with ground-based telescopes,” Brown says. “Scientists will be able to find the closest star to the sun and map asteroids in the solar system.”

NASA administrators expect the mission to find both nearby and cool objects never before detected. Scientists say that about two-thirds of nearby stars are too cool to be detected with visible light.

The WISE explorer, which weighs only about 250 pounds, will measure more than 100,000 asteroids in the solar system, and identify stars in the solar neighborhood that have not yet been seen, including those closest to the sun.

With the telescope, researchers will be able to image the entire sky in multiple infrared wavelengths, and that will help them better study asteroids, the coolest and dimmest stars, and the most luminous galaxies.
The telescope also will provide a complete inventory of dusty planet-forming discs around nearby stars, and find colliding galaxies that emit more light – specifically infrared light – than any other galaxies in the universe.

It’s expected the mission will yield more than 1 million images, from which hundreds of millions of space objects will be cataloged.

WISE also may be able to confirm the existence of dark energy, which scientists believe makes up more than 70 percent of the universe, and which Albert Einstein postulated in 1917. Einstein later believed that to be a serious blunder, but it looks like he was correct, according to Edward Wright, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California at Los Angeles and WISE’s principal investigator.

“WISE will open vast new territories for exploration, since it’s so much more sensitive than any previous survey,” Wright says. “It’ll discover the most luminous galaxies in the universe and the closest stars to the sun.”

Nearly 99 percent of the sky has not yet been observed with this kind of sensitivity. The survey should find and observe at least 100 million galaxies and hundreds of nearby cool stars that are currently unknown.

Proto-planetary discs around stars presumably condensing into a planetary system show up in the infrared. “Several have been detected, and we will be able to see many more in the Milky Way galaxy,” Wright says. “In addition, we will be able to study star-forming regions in nearby galaxies and star formation in distant galaxies.”

Such extensive sky coverage means that the mission will find and catalog all sorts of celestial eccentrics, including perhaps elusive brown dwarfs close to the Earth.

Brown dwarfs, the missing link between gas giant planets like Jupiter and small, low-mass stars, are failed stars about the size of Jupiter, with a much larger mass. They can be detected best in the infrared, but even within the infrared are very difficult to detect.

“Brown dwarfs are lurking all around us,” says Peter Eisenhardt, project scientist for WISE. “We believe there are more brown dwarfs than stars in the universe, but we haven’t found them because they are faint.”

Scientists say galaxies in the distant, or early, universe were much brighter and dustier than our Milky Way galaxy. Their dusty coats light up in infrared wavelengths.

“It’s hard to find the most energetic galaxies if you don’t know where to look,” Eisenhardt says. “We’re going to look everywhere.”

Based on Ball Aerospace’s RS-300 spacecraft, a small, low-cost craft used for space missions, WISE is an offshoot of Ball’s Deep Impact flight system.

In 2005, Deep Impact helped scientists better understand how our solar system formed by examining a comet called Tempel 1 83 million miles from Earth. Deep Impact released an “impactor spacecraft” into the comet’s path to get close-up images of the comet’s surface prior to a 23,000 mph impact. Then the mission specialists re-examined the impact crater for more information.

Ball, along with the University of Maryland and the Jet Propulsion Lab, developed and integrated Deep Impact’s impactor spacecraft. Instruments included three telescopes, three cameras and a spectrometer for analyzing the interior of the comet.

The impactor vaporized during impact and formed a canyon as large as a football stadium and 14-stories deep.
The WISE explorer is also connected to another mission called the James Webb Space Telescope known as JWST that focuses on how stars and galaxies formed in the early history of the universe. The map created by WISE is going to be used as a basis to help JWST narrow down where to point the telescope.

As the principal subcontractor for Northrop Grumman Corp., Ball’s contributed advanced optical technology and lightweight mirror system to JWST. The super-telescope’s projected liftoff is 2013.

Ball officials say the company’s extensive experience with space hardware designed for all four of NASA’s great observatories helped in the JWST work.

Ball has been involved with JWST from the beginning. Ball completed one of two NASA-funded Mission Architecture studies. Ball currently is teamed with Northrop Grumman Corp.

on Facebook on LinkedIn