Preliminary design of the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a NASA MIDEX mission, willsurvey the entire sky in four bands from 3.3 to 23 microns with a sensitivity1000 times greater than the IRAS survey. The WISE survey will extend the TwoMicron All Sky Survey into the thermal infrared and will provide an importantcatalog for the James Webb Space Telescope. Using 1024x1024 HgCdTe and Si:Asarrays at 3.3, 4.7, 12 and 23 microns, WISE will find the most luminousgalaxies in the universe, the closest stars to the Sun, and it will detect mostof the main belt asteroids larger than 3 km. The single WISE instrumentconsists of a 40 cm diamond-turned aluminum afocal telescope, a two-stage solidhydrogen cryostat, a scan mirror mechanism, and reimaging optics giving 5"resolution (full-width-half-maximum). The use of dichroics and beamsplittersallows four color images of a 47'x47' field of view to be taken every 8.8seconds, synchronized with the orbital motion to provide total sky coveragewith overlap between revolutions. WISE will be placed into a Sun-synchronouspolar orbit on a Delta 7320-10 launch vehicle. The WISE survey approach issimple and efficient. The three-axis-stabilized spacecraft rotates at aconstant rate while the scan mirror freezes the telescope line of sight duringeach exposure. WISE is currently in its Preliminary Design Phase, with themission Preliminary Design Review scheduled for July, 2005. WISE is scheduledto launch in mid 2009; the project web site can be found atwww.wise.ssl.berkeley.edu.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, 2005 San Diego SPI