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Missions & Centers

IPAC is home to the science operations center for the Spitzer Space Telescope. Spitzer is one of four of NASA's Great Observatories, and will continue to operate in its “Beyond” mission phase until its successor the James Webb Space Telescope has completed commissioning in 2019. IPAC also is home to NExScI, the science operations and analysis center for NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program, as well as science centers serving the US community which support NASA partnerships with ESA on the Herschel and Planck missions. Support for NASA's NEOWISE mission to discover and characterize near-Earth objects rounds out IPAC’s current mission support portfolio.

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NExScI
NASA Exoplanet Science Institute

The NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI) is a science operations and analysis service organization for NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program projects and the scientists and engineers that use them. NExScI facilitates the timely and successful execution of exoplanet science by providing software infrastructure, science operations, and consulting to NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program projects and their user communities. NExScI is operated by the California Institute of Technology for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

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Neowise

NEOWISE
Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer

The NEOWISE project is the asteroid-hunting portion of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. Funded by NASA's Planetary Science Division, NEOWISE harvests measurements of asteroids and comets from the WISE images and provides a rich archive for searching WISE data for solar system objects. During its primary mission which ended in 2011, NEOWISE delivered large and rich infrared datasets of minor planets, including more than 34,000 new discoveries. NEOWISE data have also enabled the discovery of the first known Earth Trojan asteroid. NEOWISE observations resumed in December 2013 and continue to date.

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SOFIA
Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy

The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is a 2.7 meter telescope carried aboard a Boeing 747SP aircraft. The observing altitudes of SOFIA are between 37,000 and 45,000 feet, above 99% of the water vapor in the Earth's atmosphere. SOFIA currently operates 6 instruments (FORCAST, FIFI-LS, FPI+, HAWC+, GREAT, and EXES), both imagers and spectrographs, covering a wide range in wavelength and spectral resolution. The US share of the overall observing time is 80%. The remaining 20% of the time is allocated to the German astronomical community. By including new instruments and upgrades to existing instruments regularly, SOFIA retains its state-of-the-art capabilities.

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ZTF
Zwicky Transient Facility

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is a new time-domain survey with first light at Palomar Observatory in 2017. Building on the highly successful legacy of the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF), ZTF uses a new camera with a 47 square degree field of view mounted on the Samuel Oschin 48-inch (1.2m) Schmidt telescope. The new camera (16 elements of 6k x 6k CCDs) enables a full scan of the northern visible sky every night. ZTF's extremely wide field and fast readout electronics will enable a survey more than an order of magnitude faster than that of PTF. ZTF will search and catalog rare and exotic transients and its data will drive novel studies of supernovae, variable stars, binaries, AGN, and asteroids.

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