Surround Sound
Infrared End of an Era
May 16, 2009Frank Low, 1933-2009
June 22, 2009
WISE, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, is all put together at BATC in Boulder
and undergoing final testing before shipping to Vandenberg for launch into a polar orbit late in 2009.
One of the tests is an acoustic test which simulates the intense noise during launch. Even from 3 miles away the noise is very loud. The photo shows WISE in a clean room tent surrounded by banks of speakers and amplifiers that could power a large rock concert, but all the speakers are pointing inward.
WISE acoustic test setup
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.
