Working with the WISE Guys

 By Andrew Lucas, Team Sirius

Over the summer, I had an internship at IPAC, the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, which is located at CalTech but officially a part of JPL. I worked on processing data from the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. WISE was launched on December 14, 2009. Its mission was to image the entire sky in four specific bandwidths of infrared (3.4, 4.6, 12 and 22 μm). It did so until August 6, 2010, when the solid hydrogen in the outer cryogen tank ran out. This meant that the telescope became too hot to image in the 22 μm band, but it continued imaging in the other three bands until the inner cryogen tank was exhausted. It still continued imaging in the 3.4 and 4.6 μm bands until Feb-ruary 1, 2011. This means that by the time I got around to examining the data, it had been thoroughly examined already in the intervening time.

WISE found many things in space, including black holes and asteroids, among other things. My job was to look through the data for comets. This involved a surprising amount of computer programming, including learning Unix from a manual published in 1972! It surprised me that most of it was still accurate!

The process consisted of downloading pictures from IR-SA, the Infrared Science Archive, and “stacking” them using AWAIC, A WISE Astronomical Image Co-adder. This long-named program did something rather simple: it took every image of the same region of sky taken by the telescope as it passed and mashed them together into one image. The final product looked something like the pictures on the left.

My experience at IPAC was my first introduction into “real” astronomy, by which I mean the kind of astronomy that actual astronomers do for a living, as opposed to learning things in a classroom or doing ac-tivities on INSPIRE. I was struck by two things in particular. One, infrared astronomy consists of a surprising amount of running computer programs and trying to pick out special white blips from noisy white blips. Two, looking at white blips on a black background is a surprisingly fascinating job.

If I managed to interest you with my long blog post, you can learn more about WISE from the WISE All-Sky Explanatory Supplement, where I found the pictures and any specific information I couldn’t remember.

http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/release/allsky/expsup/index.html

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