Its going up today! Ramping up the search for a Brown Dwarf!



NASA will launch infrared telescope to scan entire sky
By Brandon Griggs, CNN
December 14, 2009 8:29 a.m. EST

(CNN) -- NASA is hours away from blasting a new telescope into space to scan the cosmos for undiscovered objects, including asteroids and comets that might threaten Earth.

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, spacecraft will employ an infrared camera to detect light- and heat-emitting objects that other orbiting telescopes, such as the Hubble, might miss.

WISE is scheduled to launch Monday morning aboard a Delta II rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The launch window extends from 9:09 to 9:23 a.m. ET and was postponed from Friday because of a problem with the motion of a booster steering engine.

If the launch goes as planned, the unmanned WISE will spend the next nine months in orbit, 326 miles above the Earth, mapping the universe in infrared light. Its lens eventually will cover the whole sky 1½ times, snapping a picture every 11 seconds.

"The last time we mapped the whole sky at these particular infrared wavelengths was 26 years ago," said Edward "Ned" Wright of UCLA, the principal investigator of the mission. He was referring to WISE's predecessor, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, which launched in 1983 and discovered six comets.

[link to www.cnn.com]