A NASA spacecraft that retired after finding thousands of asteroids is coming back to life to embark on a three-year mission.
The goal of the missions will be to search for undiscovered Near Earth Objects (NEOs), and find asteroids that could host a human visit, a NASA press release reported.
An NEO is an object that orbits 28 million miles away from Earth or less.
The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) will be revived, it will use its 16-inch telescope and some infrared cameras to find and categorize about 150 new asteroids. It will also discover new information about over 2,000 previously known NEOs.
"The WISE mission achieved its mission's goals and as NEOWISE extended the science even further in its survey of asteroids. NASA is now extending that record of success, which will enhance our ability to find potentially hazardous asteroids, and support the new asteroid initiative," John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science, said.. "Reactivating WISE is an excellent example of how we are leveraging existing capabilities across the agency to achieve our goal."
NASA's asteroid initiative will be the first-ever mission to "identify, capture and relocate an asteroid." The new findings could help NASA protect the planet from a threatening asteroid in the future.
During the NEOWISE mission, which ran from 2010 to 2011, the WISE spacecraft took 7,500 images that helped document NEOs.
"The data collected by NEOWISE two years ago have proven to be a gold mine for the discovery and characterization of the NEO population," Lindley Johnson, NASA's NEOWISE program executive in Washington, said. "It is important that we accumulate as much of this type of data as possible while the WISE spacecraft remains a viable asset."
The ultimate goal of the previous WISE mission was to scan the entire sky for rocky bodies and celestial objects. They were able to catalogue 560 million objects, some in deep space and others closer to Earth.
"The team is ready and after a quick checkout, we're going to hit the ground running," Amy Mainzer, NEOWISE principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said. "NEOWISE not only gives us a better understanding of the asteroids and comets we study directly, but it will help us refine our concepts and mission operation plans for future, space-based near-Earth object cataloging missions.
