roomthily

mosaic from the WISE infrared telescope, NASA, celebrating a new atlas of 560+ million objects

via Wired Science

(image: asteroids and comets observed by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE))

So far, the mission has observed more than 60,000 asteroids, both Main Belt and near-Earth objects. Most were known before, but more than 11,000 are new.

“Our data pipeline is bursting with asteroids,” said WISE Principal Investigator Ned Wright of UCLA. “We are discovering about a hundred a day, mostly in the Main Belt.”

via NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory