WISE launched into the morning skies above Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California on December 14, 2009. By early 2011, it had finished scanning the entire sky twice in infrared light, snapping pictures of three-quarters of a billion objects, including remote galaxies, stars and asteroids. Today, astronomers continue to mine a cosmic quarry of data provided by WISE.
Upon completing its surveys in 2011, WISE was put to sleep. But in Sept. 2013, NASA reactivated the mission with the primary goal of scanning for near-Earth objects, or NEOs. Though the WISE mission had been doing asteroid searches before it entered hibernation, through a project called NEOWISE, that had not been its main purpose until now. For its new chapter in life, the mission is officially renamed NEOWISE.
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