The sun will cause NASA's NEOWISE space telescope to burn up in the atmosphere

By: Maksim Panasovskiy | 17.12.2023, 01:09

The Sun's activity from time to time disrupts radio communications on Earth. Soon from our star will suffer from our telescope NEOWISE, belonging to NASA.

Here's What We Know

The Sun will cause NEOWISE to burn up in the dense layers of the atmosphere. This is because the growing activity of the star causes the atmosphere to heat up and expand, causing objects in orbit to brake faster and fall. It is expected that the space telescope will burn up after 2024, as it will no longer be able to correct its orbit.

Note that the NEOWISE observatory was originally called WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer). The infrared telescope was launched into space 14 years ago, and two years later the sensors lost sensitivity due to a lack of cryogenic coolant.

After another two years, WISE was renamed NEOWISE. Since the observatory lacked the sensitivity to observe distant galaxies, scientists decided to use it to search for objects near our planet.

Since NEOWISE began its work, the sky has been scanned more than two dozen times. As a result, it was possible to detect more than 3000 objects that were approaching the Earth. More than 200 of them was able to fix it was the observatory NEOWISE.

Source: NASA