WISE up – first image from NASA mission

NASA has released the first images from its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer.

The space agency has released four cleaned up, false colour images from WISE, which has beamed back about 250,000 since it was launched on 14 December and began scanning the sky a month later.

“WISE has worked superbly,” says Ed Weiler, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA (press release). “These first images are proving the spacecraft’s secondary mission of helping to track asteroids, comets and other stellar objects will be just as critically important as its primary mission of surveying the entire sky in infrared.”

Using slightly more flowery language is the principle investigator of WISE, Edward Wright of UCLA. “We’ve got a candy store of images coming down from space,” he says. “Everyone has their favourite flavours, and we’ve got them all.”