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The NEOWISE project is the asteroid-hunting portion of the Wide-field Infrared Explorer (WISE) mission. Funded by NASA's Planetary Science Division, NEOWISE harvests asteroids and comets from the WISE images and provides an archive for searching the WISE data for solar system scientists.
The mission began its life as WISE for its first eight months of survey operations until the frozen hydrogen cooling the telescope was depleted. The mission continued as NEOWISE for an additional four months, finishing up its survey of the inner solar system.
The NEOWISE project was responsible for archiving the millions of individual images collected by the WISE telescope. To date, the NEOWISE team has delivered infrared detections of more than 158,000 minor planets to the scientific community, including more than 34,000 new discoveries.
NEOWISE data have been used to set limits on the numbers, orbits, sizes, and probable compositions of asteroids throughout our solar system, and the mission discovered the first known Earth Trojan asteroid.
