NASA has decided to reactivate the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) Space Telescope after about two and a half years of inactivity. Its mission will be to find the so-called near-Earth objects (NEOs), asteroids and comets whose orbits cross that of the Earth and are therefore potentially dangerous.

Launched on December 14, 2009, the WISE spacecraft had as its primary mission the creation of infrared images of the entire sky creating a catalog published by NASA last year. Its most sensitive instruments needed to work at very low temperatures, therefore they functioned until the exhaustion of the hydrogen used for their cooling.

Two of the detectors of the WISE Space Telescope can work without the need for cooling so they were used for the extended mission called Near-Earth Object WISE (NEOWISE), which allowed to discover many new asteroids and comets. Once this new mission was finisched, WISE was put into a state of hibernation on February 1, 2011.

The discovery of many objects of the NEO type and the fact that some of them passed at a distance that in astronomical terms is very close to the Earth had already convinced both NASA and ESA of the importance of keeping an eye on those celestial bodies. The meteorite shower that struck a Russian town a few months ago increased the sensitivity even among common people about this problem.

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The WISE spacecraft has already been shown its ability to detect the presence of asteroids and comets with its infrared sensors so it’s really a great idea put it back in business. Its previous missions had a cost of around $300 million, a new probe presumably would cost more or less the same. The new WISE mission will cost only a small fraction of that amount and will contribute to the safety of the Earth.

The next month the WISE space telescope reactivation operations will begin with the restarting of its equipment but also with the cooling of the probe. Now its temperature is about 200 K, which will be taken down to about 75 K by pointing it towards deep space for some time allowing some of its heat to disperse.

This new mission of the WISE Space Telescope is also supposed to be useful to find the asteroid that should be the goal of a future mission wanted by the Obama administration with the aim to send astronauts to an asteroid to capture it in order to study it.

At this time it’s impossible to say whether and when this mission will actually be accomplished. For now, NASA has released an animation that illustrates the sending of the Orion spacecraft to the asteroid chosen and the operations on it.