NEOWISE 2016 Data Release
The Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer at IPAC
The NEOWISE 2016 Data Release
March 23, 2016
Access the Database and Image data via IRSA
Read the Explanatory
Supplement
Top Ten List of things you should know about the NEOWISE Release Products
NEOWISE Release sky coverage
NEOWISE Project website
NEOWISE mission description paper
Contact the IRSA Help Desk
Frequently asked questions
(FAQ)
The
NEOWISE 2016 Data Release
makes available
the 3.4 and 4.6 μm (W1 and W2) Single-exposure images and extracted source
information that were acquired between December 13, 2014 and December 13, 2015
UTC, the second year of survey operations of the
Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared
Survey Explorer Reactivation Mission
(NEOWISE;
Mainzer et al. 2014, ApJ, 792, 30
).
The second year NEOWISE data products are concatenated with those
from the first year (originally released on
March 26, 2015
into a single archive so that all data can be queried easily at one time.
NEOWISE utilizes the Wide-Field Infrared Explorer (WISE;
Wright et al. 2010, AJ, 140, 1868
spacecraft that surveyed the entire sky in 2010 with a cryogenically cooled
40 cm telescope and four 1kx1k mid-infrared array detectors. WISE
continued to survey for four months following the exhaustion of its solid
hydrogen cryogen in September 2010 using its two short wavelength bands.
After completing a survey of the inner main asteroid belt and a second
coverage of the sky, WISE was placed into hibernation in February
2011.
The WISE spacecraft was brought out of hibernation in September 2013
and renamed NEOWISE with a mission to detect and characterize
asteroids and comets, and to learn more about the population of near-Earth
objects that could pose an impact hazard to the Earth. The spacecraft was
returned to zenith pointing which enabled the telescope and focal plane
to passively cool down to approximately 73 K. Survey operations were
resumed on December 13, 2013 UTC with the W1 and W2 detectors operating
at sensitivities near those of the original cryogenic survey. The first
solar system moving object tracklet
candidates were
reported to the
IAU Minor Planet
Center
on December 26, and tracklet deliveries continue to
be made three times per week. As of mid-March, 2016, NEOWISE has
made over 350,000 infrared measurements of approximately
19,000 different solar system objects.
The combined
NEOWISE Data Release
products from the
first two years of survey operations include:
Single-exposure Images - 5,055,732
calibrated
1016x1016 pix @2.75"/pix FITS image sets for the individual 7.7 sec W1 and W2
NEOWISE survey exposures. Each image set consists of two intensity images,
noise maps, and bit-masks indicating pixel use status, one each for the W1
and W2 bands.
Single-exposure Source Database
Time-tagged fluxes, positions and measurement information for
38,159,806,157
source detections extracted from the
Single-exposure images.
Moving Object Tracklets
- Sets of linked
NEOWISE position-time pair measurements of solar system objects that
have been confirmed by the
IAU Minor Planet
Center
. NEOWISE acquired over
299,000
confirmed infrared detections of
17,240
different objects
during the first two years of the survey.
Known Solar System Object Possible Association List
Database
of asteroids, comets, planets and planetary satellites, known at the time
of data processing, that are predicted to be in the field-of-view of
individual NEOWISE Single-exposure images. This is not a vetted list of
solar system object detections. Refer to the NEOWISE Moving Object Tracklets
for confirmed solar system object detections.
NEOWISE scanned the sky nearly four complete times during the
first two years of survey operations, with six months separating survey
passes. Twelve independent exposures are acquired at each
point on the sky near the ecliptic plane during each survey epoch,
and the number of samples increases towards the ecliptic poles.
As illustrated in Figure 1, the NEOWISE 2016 Release brings the total
number of independent observations near the ecliptic plane to ~48, increasing
to over 11,000 observations very close to the ecliptic poles.
The NEOWISE Release Single-exposure data products are time-domain
resources for extracting thermal flux and position measurements for NEOWISE
moving object detections, as well as a precovery archive for solar system
objects discovered after the NEOWISE observations.
The NEOWISE products are also an archive for studying flux variability and
proper motion of galactic and extragalactic objects. When combined from the
Single-exposure data from the original WISE mission, the NEOWISE images and
source detection database provide an archive that spans a six year baseline
with six or seven separate epochs of observation.
The NEOWISE Reactivation Mission is funded by the NASA Planetary Science
Division.
Planetary science research using NEOWISE data is eligible for proposals
to the
NASA ROSES Solar System Workings and Planetary Data Archiving,
Restoration and Tools Programs
. Astrophysics reasearch
using NEOWISE data is eligible for proposals to the
NASA ROSES Astrophysics Data Analysis Program.
Figure 1 - NEOWISE Year 1+2 Depth-of-Coverage.
Ecliptic Aitoff projection sky map showing the average number of individual
Single-exposures within 12´ × 12´ spatial bins that are
included in the NEOWISE data release. Colors encode different frame
depths-of-coverage as specified by the legend on the bottom.
The percentages of sky covered to various depths are given in the
upper left. Approximately 10% of the sky bounded by ecliptic longitude ranges
107.5°<λ<126.1° and 281.4°<λ<299.2°
was not observed during the first coverage epoch because of
a safe hold event.
Please use this acknowledgement in any published material that makes
use of NEOWISE data products:
"This publication makes use of data products from the Near-Earth Object
Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE), which is a project of the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology. NEOWISE is
funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration."
Last update - 2016 March 22