“Due to solar activity”, NASA experts expect the WISE telescope to leave its orbit

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the NEOWISE mission, which has been in orbit around Earth for more than 13 years (since February 2011), will end at the end of July because the WISE orbiting telescope is losing orbital stability due to increased solar activity. Frequent solar flares and other solar activity have caused the upper layers of Earth’s atmosphere to expand significantly, increasing their damping effect on orbiting probes.

It is worth noting that satellites close to the Earth, as a rule, counteract these flares with the help of maneuvering engines, but the WISE telescope has long exhausted its fuel reserves, which is why it cannot withstand changes in the structure of the Earth’s atmosphere. Therefore, NASA specialists plan to end its mission on July 31. After that, they expect it to burn up in the atmosphere at the end of this year or the beginning of 2025.

The WISE infrared telescope is part of NASA’s Explorers program. Its mission was to create detailed maps of the night sky. Its mission ended when it ran out of coolant in February 2011, but it continues to operate as part of the NEOWISE mission, which aims to study asteroids and other small celestial bodies in the solar system.

Over the course of 13 years, the WISE telescope has captured more than 44,000 images of celestial bodies and discovered regarding 200 previously unknown near-Earth objects, including the Earth-orbiting asteroid Trojan, and twenty comets, including the famous comet NEOWISE, which was visible at night in the summer of 2020.

Source: TASS