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Description
The Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer Reactivation Mission (NEOWISE; Mainzer et al. 2014, ApJ, 792, 30) is a NASA Planetary Science Division space-based survey to detect, track and characterize asteroids and comets, and to learn more about the population of near-Earth objects that could pose an impact hazard to the Earth. NEOWISE systematically images the sky at 3.4 and 4.6 μm, obtaining multiple independent observations on each location that enable detection of previously known and new solar system small bodies by virtue of the their motion. Because it is an infrared survey, NEOWISE detects asteroid thermal emission and is equally sensitive to high and low albedo objects.
The NEOWISE 2015 Data Release is the first annual release of Single-exposure data, and contains all observations from the first year of survey operations, 13 December 2013 to 13 December 2014 UTC. NEOWISE scanned the sky nearly two complete times during this period, accumulating 24 or more independent exposures on each point on the sky.
The 2015 NEOWISE Release data products include single-exposure Images - 2,497,867 calibrated 1016x1016 pix @2.75"/pix FITS image sets for the individual 7.7 sec W1 and W2 NEOWISE survey exposures. Each image set consists of two intensity images, noise maps, and bit-masks indicating pixel use status, one each for the W1 and W2 bands.
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