NASA’s NEOWISE Mission Expected to End Soon; Solar Activity Will Drag Space Telescope Out of Orbit by 2025

NASA could lose one of its space telescopes exploring asteroids in two years. NASA's NEOWISE is dedicated to hunting asteroids but is reportedly already spiraling back to Earth.

NASA's NEOWISE Mission at Risk Due to Solar Activity

NEOWISE, NASA's mission to search for asteroids and comets, has finally run its course after more than ten years. The WISE ("Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer") satellite, which was launched in December 2009, is currently carrying out the NEOWISE mission, which aims to map the sky in infrared light and identify near-Earth comets and asteroids in addition to far-off stars and galaxies. However, WISE was always running on a finite amount of fuel, and in October 2010, the spacecraft's four infrared detectors ran out of hydrogen. There is now a considerably more serious existential threat to the NEOWISE spacecraft than just a coolant shortage. The current period of solar activity, which lasts 11 years, is rising.

The Earth's atmosphere is heating up and expanding due to increased solar flares and coronal mass ejections, pulling the telescope downward. A recent report from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California announced that the NEOWISE mission will conclude in a few years. By 2025, JPL mission planners predict that solar activity will pull the space telescope out of orbit and into Earth's atmosphere, where it will explode.

"The mission has planned for this day a long time," Joseph Masiero, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology and NEOWISE's deputy principal investigator, said in a statement.

Masiero says the sun is rising again after a few years of quiet. Now that we cannot maintain our orbit due to solar activity, NEOWISE is gradually returning to Earth.

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NASA's NEOWISE Celebrated 10 Years

NASA's NEOWISE has had a hectic ten years. The space telescope's reactivated mission started on Dec. 13, 2013. Since then, it has observed over 3,000 near-Earth objects, aided the rendezvous of another NASA mission with a faraway asteroid, and found a once-in-a-lifetime comet.

The last decade has been the spacecraft's second life. NEOWISE, overseen by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, is an adaptation of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), an earlier mission launched in 2009. The study of far-off galaxies, cool stars, exploding white dwarf stars, outgassing comets, near-Earth asteroids, and more has been made possible by data from WISE and NEOWISE.

The all-sky infrared scan that WISE conducted in 2010 met its scientific objective of being significantly more sensitive than earlier surveys. Tens of millions of supermassive black holes that are actively feeding can be seen all over the sky using the WISE spacecraft. Through the Disk Detective initiative, citizen scientists have utilized WISE data to locate circumstellar disks-spinning clouds of gas, dust, and debris around stars.

Not only could astronomers depend on the mission to locate these objects, but they could also utilize the data they collected to determine the objects' size and albedo-- the amount of sunlight reflected off their surfaces and learn more about the minerals and materials that make them up.

"NEOWISE has showcased the importance of having an infrared space survey telescope as part of NASA's planetary defense strategy while also keeping tabs on other objects in the solar system and beyond," said Amy Mainzer, the mission's principal investigator at the University of Arizona in Tucson.