Scientists Studying Near Earth Objects Release Stunning New Images from NASA’s NEOWISE Mission | UAP

A team of NASA scientists studying data collected by the NEOWISE mission, designed to detect and catalog small objects passing near Earth, has published over 26 million previously unreleased images.

A follow-up to the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission launched in 2009, which studied the entire night sky and conducted 21 complete sky surveys during more than a decade of operation, NEOWISE re-tasked the same telescope in 2013 to look for near-Earth objects (NEOs) that could pose a potential threat if they crashed into the Earth.

During its operational phase, NEOWISE detected over 3,000 NEOs, including larger objects like comets and smaller objects like asteroids. The team believes this figure represents roughly 10% of the objects currently believed to exist close to Earth.

While still a fraction of the total, the team says that cataloging this many NEOs in such detail was only possible due to NEOWISE’s expansive view of the night sky.

“Because of NEOWISE’s extensive view of the sky, we get a more complete picture of the asteroids and comets in Earth’s orbital neighborhood,” explained Roc Cutri, NEOWISE Task Lead and Project Scientist at IPAC, in a…