The goal of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission is to perform a highly sensitive all-sky survey in 4 wavebands from 3 to 25 μm. Launched on a Delta II rocket into a 500 km Sun-synchronous orbit in June 2009, during its 7 months of operations, WISE will acquire about 50 GBytes of raw science data every day, which will be down-linked via the TDRSS relay satellite system and processed into an astronomical catalogue and image atlas. The WISE mission operations system is being implemented in collaboration between UCLA, JPL and IPAC (Caltech). In this paper we describe the challenges to manage a high data rate, cryogenic, low earth-orbit mission; maintaining safe on-orbit operations, fast anomaly recoveries (mandated by the desire to provide complete sky coverage in a limited lifetime), production and dissemination of high quality science products, given the constraints imposed by funding profiles for small space missions.

Date Published: 30 June 2006
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 6270, Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems, 62701C (30 June 2006); doi: 10.1117/12.672162

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6270:
Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems
David R. Silva; Rodger E. Doxsey, Editor(s)