The Eclipse from WISE
WISE gets new NEOs for its birthday
December 17, 2010WISE is shutting down
February 1, 2011
WISE flew through the Moon’s shadow over the North pole during the 04 Jan 2011 solar eclipse. The plot below shows the number of coarse digital Sun sensors giving usable output, and the number fell to zero during the eclipse.
Sun sensors vs time during the 04 Jan 2011 solar eclipse.
Since this eclipse was much shorter than the eclipses by Earth around the June solstice, the battery was easily able to make up for the lost solar array power.
nwright
Ned Wright, 65 years old, is a professor at UCLA. He did far-infrared observations using a 102-cm balloon-borne telescope for his PhD thesis, and has since observed with the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, and the space-based COBE, WMAP, Spitzer and WISE missions.
