The Stars Are Ours, Inside NASA's Online Image Treasure Chest(大箱子)

NASA公布了一批广角红外线探测望远镜拍下的太空红外图像 A treasure(财富, 宝物) trove(珍藏品, 贵重发现物) of images from space is now available, as NASA has released the some of data and images collected by the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).(广角红外线探测望远镜) WISE began scanning the sky on Dec. 14, 2009, traversing (横渡, 横越)it 1.5 times in a polar(两极的, 对立的) orbit while collecting data across four infrared wavelengths of light. All told, it collected more than 2.7 million images, which will eventually all be made available to the public. For now, the archive is available in two forms: a version for the public, with images collected by WISE, is at this U.C. Berkley Web site. A second archive for astronomers(天文学家) can be found here, on a CalTech server. The mission's nearby discoveries included 20 comets, more than 33,000 asteroids(小行星, 海盘车) between Mars and Jupiter(木星), and 133 near-Earth objects (NEOs), which are those asteroids and comets with orbits that come within 28 million miles (about 45 million kilometers) of Earth's path around the sun, NASA said. The satellite went into hibernation(冬眠) in early February of this year. Data from the first 57 percent of the sky surveyed is accessible through an online public archive. The complete survey, with improved data processing, will be made available in the spring of 2012. Specifically, that archive, dubbed(命名的, 配音的, 译制的) the "the WISE Preliminary Release," includes data from the first 105 days of WISE survey observations, from Jan. 14 2010, through April 29, 2010, including an atlas(地图集; 图解集#巨神阿特拉斯; 身负重担的人) of 10,464 calibrated(测定口径, 查看刻度, 校准), coadded image sets, and a source catalog containing positional and photometric(光度计的, 光度测定的) information for over 257 million objects detected on the WISE images. Astronomers will use WISE's infrared data to hunt for hidden oddities(奇异, 奇妙, 古怪, 怪癖), and to study trends in large populations of known objects, NASA added. "WISE is providing the newest-generation 'address book' of the infrared universe with the precise location and brightness of hundreds of millions of celestial(天上的, 非凡的) objects," said Roc Cutri, lead scientist for WISE data processing at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif, in a statement. "WISE continues the long tradition of infrared sky surveys supported by Caltech, stretching(伸展, 连绵, 张开) back to the 1969 Two Micron Sky Survey." http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2383671,00.asp