Welcome to Gaia! ::

Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer
site: http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/

Launch date is set for Dec. 9, 09 it will take

WISE will survey the whole sky in infrared light, and will produce an all-sky image atlas and catalogue of over 300 million infrared sources. Things of particular interest to the scientists working on WISE are asteroids, the coldest and nearest stars, regions of new star and planet formation, the structure of the Milky Way Galaxy, Ultra-luminous infrared galaxies, and the large scale structure of the Universe.


Also the existence or nonexistence of the supposed companion star (named Nemesis) to our own sun will be answered by WISE, If the supposed brown dwarf is out their in the ort cloud, WISE wont be able to miss it.
Nemesis is a hypothetical object posed to be the reason for the apparent average time interval between extinction events which has been determined to be about every 26 million years.

Yep, I'm excited for this mission particularly because of what well find out about this supposed complain to our sun. If it is real then its first time we ever observed a binary pare orbiting so far apart from each other. I heard about Nemesis year or two ago on an episode of The Universe though the evidence for it at the time I learned about it was slim, the information form the show was just as much as what was described on the Wikipedia page.

I'm exited to get more news about the subject I've been waiting a long time to hear something new; only a few more days to wait now.

They keep pushing back the launch date! scream

The WISE launch is currently scheduled for no earlier than Monday, December 14th, at 6:09:33 am pacific, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in CA.

Launched today at 6:09:33 am pacific, Launch went off without a hitch.

I'm glad they finally launched it! biggrin

Cool! Hope it will find something bigger razz

Cool, can't wait until we find some galaxies!!! biggrin