{"id":25233,"date":"2010-02-12T10:00:49","date_gmt":"2010-02-12T10:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/gregladen\/2010\/02\/12\/wise-discovers-its-first-comet\/"},"modified":"2010-02-12T10:00:49","modified_gmt":"2010-02-12T10:00:49","slug":"wise-discovers-its-first-comet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/12\/wise-discovers-its-first-comet\/","title":{"rendered":"WISE discovers its first comet"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"i-0a266ece142696f3ffc13cf2dfc00098-p_the_comet_dot.jpg\"
\nThe red smudge at the center of this picture is the first comet discovered by NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. Image credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/UCLA<\/em>
\n
\nNASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer discovered its first ever comet as part of an infrared survey of the whole sky.<\/p>\n

The comet is called “P\/2010 B2 (WISE),” but is known on the street as WISE. If they keep naming comets like that this will get confusing as WISE will probably discover dozens of these suckers.<\/p>\n

P (which is what I like to call it) is 175 x 106<\/sup> km away from Earth, about 2 km in diameter, and about 4.5 million<\/del> billion years old. P is in the part of its orbit where it is heading away from the sun.<\/p>\n

“Comets are ancient reservoirs of water. They are one of the few places besides Earth in the inner solar system where water is known to exist,” said Amy Mainzer of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Mainzer is the principal investigator of NEOWISE, a project to find and catalog new asteroids and comets spotted by WISE (the acronym combines WISE with NEO, the shorthand for near-Earth object).<\/p>\n

“With WISE, we have a powerful tool to find new comets and learn more about the population as a whole. Water is necessary for life as we know it, and comets can tell us more about how much there is in our solar system.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

WISE (the telescope) will also likely discover lots of asteroids, and this new information on the comets and asteroids will contribute to the overall galactic threat assessment.<\/p>\n

“It is very unlikely that a comet will hit Earth,” said James Bauer, a scientist at JPL working on the WISE project, “But, in the rare chance that one did, it could be dangerous. The new discoveries from WISE will give us more precise statistics about the probability of such an event, and how powerful an impact it might yield.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

More info here. <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The red smudge at the center of this picture is the first comet discovered by NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. Image credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/UCLA<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[191],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fhV1-6yZ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25233"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}