WISE All-Sky Known Solar System Object Possible Association List

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mapped the entire sky in four infrared bands during its full cryogenic mission from 7 January 2010 to 6 August 2010. The Known Solar System Object Possible Associations List is a compendium of asteroids, comets, planets, and satellites predicted to be within the field of view of individual WISE exposures, with potential associations to over 9.4 billion single-exposure source detections. The data release includes an Atlas of 18,240 images and a Source Catalog with positional and photometric information for over 563 million objects.

Use Cases

• Identifying potential infrared detections of known asteroids and comets based on predicted positional proximity.
• Refining solar system object orbits by cross-referencing predicted positions with actual WISE single-exposure source detections.
• Analyzing infrared photometric properties (3.4 to 22 μm) of solar system bodies from the multiple observations per object.
• Filtering spurious detections from the single-exposure source table for cleaner astrophysical analysis, as cautioned in the notes.

Strengths

• Data originates from NASA's WISE mission, a full-sky infrared survey with calibrated, multi-band photometry.
• Includes positional and brightness information linked from a massive single-exposure database containing over 9.4 billion source detections.
• Covers the entire sky with multiple observations per point, providing independent measurements for objects.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The single-exposure source table includes spurious detections (noise, artifacts) that are flagged but not filtered, requiring cautious use.
• Row count for the specific association list is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Observations from the WISE satellite during its full cryogenic mission phase, processed with improved calibrations and reduction algorithms.

Time Range

7 January 2010 to 6 August 2010

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 19:40:23.789332; freshness should be verified.

Geography

All-sky coverage