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Millions of New Photos From NASA's Asteroid-Hunting Telescope Are Now Online

The NEOWISE telescope took millions of infrared images of near-earth comets and asteroids last year.

After announcing that it had discovered 40 near-Earth comets and asteroids—including eight potentially hazardous ones!—NASA is putting millions of images of celestial objects taken by the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) online.

The NEOWISE telescope scanned the sky for asteroids and comets from December 2013 to December 2014, taking literally millions of infrared images of the dawn and twilight skies. Those are "the magic hours" when NEOWISE is pointed perpendicular to a line between the Sun and Earth, and can spot near-Earth objects that NASA describes as "very dark, similar to printer toner" that visual telescopes would miss.

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NASA has been sorting through all this new data itself and, making visualizations like the above video, which make you wonder how long we've got before the big one. But the images are now open to anyone to poke through and do with as they see fit, provided they can navigate the arcane Caltech-hosted website.

I spent some time looking up two famous asteroids that have recently passed Earth: 2004 B86, which swung by in January, and 2014-YB35, which passed by earlier today. It took some manipulation and swapping color palettes, but there it is! I found it! Maybe. There's a reason it takes a long time to become an astronomer.​

"One of the most satisfying things about releasing these cutting-edge astronomical data to the public is seeing what other exciting and creative projects the scientific community does with them," said Amy Mainzer, principal investigator for NEOWISE at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, in a press release.

NASA's interest in asteroids goes beyond just NEOWISE. The space agency has a spacecraft named Dawn that just started orbiting Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt. And just this week NASA announced that it was planning on grabbing a boulder off an asteroid and putting in orbit around the Moon.