The space telescope NEOWISE sadly approaches its fiery demise due to solar flares, which are causing the infrared telescope to gradually deviate from its orbit before burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere.
The NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) from NASA will be rendered useless by early 2025 due to increased solar activity, as announced by the space agency.
It is expected that the telescope’s orbit will gradually decrease over time. This is due to the heating of the Earth’s atmosphere by the Sun, which causes it to expand. As a result, satellites in orbit experience an increase in atmospheric resistance, leading to a decrease in their altitude.
And the blame is on solar activity
The Sun is approaching its solar maximum, a period in which solar flares and explosive coronal mass ejections intensify. During this period of the Sun’s 11-year cycle, atmospheric gases will slow down NEOWISE, dragging it further down into Earth’s atmosphere. As a result, the telescope will not be able to maintain its orbit around our planet.
“After several years of calm, the Sun is waking up again,” declared Joseph Masiero, deputy principal investigator of the NEOWISE mission. “We are at the mercy of solar activity, and without means to stay in orbit, NEOWISE is now slowly spiraling back towards Earth.”
NEOWISE had avoided the wrath of the Sun for the past 10 years of its reactivated mission. The space telescope was launched in 2009 with the goal of surveying the sky in infrared light, capturing distant galaxies, cold stars, and exploding white dwarf stars with much greater sensitivity than other surveys.
At that time, it was simply known as WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer). The telescope mapped the sky twice before running out of cryogenic coolant, which allowed it to observe infrared wavelengths without the heat from the spacecraft interfering with its observations. Subsequently, WISE went into hibernation in February 2011.
After almost three years floating without any purpose, the telescope received a second life. In December 2013, NASA reassigned the mission to observe objects near Earth, thus helping to protect our planet from possible threats.
During the last 10 years of service, NEOWISE scanned the entire sky more than 20 times and made 1.45 million infrared measurements of over 44,000 objects in the solar system, according to NASA. The telescope observed more than 3,000 near-Earth objects, 215 of which were discovered by it, including a long-period comet of the same name.
Even after its disappearance, researchers will continue to rely on the valuable data collected by NEOWISE to continue making new discoveries.
