In November, a Delta II rocket will launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base carrying the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and with it will go some of the hopes and aspirations of astronomer Dr. Amy Mainzer. Employed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), she serves as both a deputy project scientist for WISE and principal investigator on several WISE projects. Once launched and when the IR telescope achieves a successful polar synchronous orbit 525 km above the Earth, WISE will be able to take 1.5 million pictures of 99% of the sky at infrared wavelength sensitivities 500 times that of its predecessor IRAS. The project will take over 6 months to complete and provide Amy Mainzer and other astronomers with the most comprehensive sky survey yet that will hopefully reveal the locations of greater numbers of asteroids, brown dwarfs, quasars, and IR luminous galaxies. For Amy Mainzer, studying the photo survey will be 7th heaven.
Amy Mainzer earned a bachelor's degree in physics at Stanford University and then completed her Master's in astronomy at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. From there she went to University of California Los Angeles to finish her doctorate in astronomy in 2003 and worked on NASA's SOFIA project. Her particular interests in astronomy are asteroids and brown dwarfs. She also specializes in developing astronomic instrumentation.
WISE is not the first NASA project that Dr. Mainzer has been involved in. She worked at Lockheed Martin and developed a guidance sensor on the Spitzer Space Telescope that has been in operation since 2003. As part of her thesis, she helped design First Light Infrared Test Experiment Camera (FLITECAM) for SOFIA, the airborne IR observatory that utilizes a 747 widebody airliner to perform high altitude observations of the sky.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) hired Dr. Mainzer in 2003 to work on the WISE project and develop better data processing instrumentation for the telescope platform's camera. She also is focused on improving the telescope's performance in detecting Near Earth Asteroids (NEO). She regularly provides updates about WISE on her NASA blog. The WISE spacecraft has just been transported to Vandenberg AFB and is undergoing final assembly and checkout preparations. A photo of WISE platform at Vandenberg can be seen below courtesy of Dr. Mainzer.