Preliminary Results from NEOWISE: An Enhancement to the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for Solar System Science

Understand

The \emph{Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer} has surveyed the entire sky at four infrared wavelengths with greatly improved sensitivity and spatial resolution compared to its predecessors, the \emph{Infrared Astronomical Satellite} and the \emph{Cosmic Background Explorer}.

• NASA's Planetary Science Division has funded an enhancement to the \WISE\ data processing system called "NEOWISE" that allows detection and archiving of moving objects found in the \WISE\ data.
• NEOWISE has mined the \WISE\ images for a wide array of small bodies in our Solar System, including Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), Main Belt asteroids, comets, Trojans, and Centaurs.
• By the end of survey operations in February 2011, NEOWISE identified over 157,000 asteroids, including more than 500 NEOs and $\sim$120 comets.