View looking down the barrel of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, telescope. This image shows the 40 cm WISE primary mirror, which is the largest optical element in the WISE system. This image shows the initial assembly of the optics. After this initial check-out, the optical system will be disassembled for painting and the aluminum mirrors will be given a thin Gold coating. Gold is a good reflector in the infrared and is often used to coat IR optics.
JPL manages the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The mission's principal investigator, Edward Wright, is at UCLA. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory, Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing will take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. More information is online at http://wise.astro.ucla.edu.