Amy Mainzer knows a lot about infrared. She was deputy project scientist for the Wide-filed Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), which used infrared to study the entire sky. She's now principle investigator on NEOWISE, a project that uses WISE images to study asteroids and comets. Amy Mainzer joined us for the inaugural episode of “Blue Dot.”
On Spitzer and WISE
One of the great surprises of the Spitzer Space telescope is that it was actually able to take pictures of an exoplanet and learn more about its atmosphere. That was a pretty amazing discovery for a telescope that was never designed to do that.
It’s nice to have both. If you have your wide-angle lens (WISE), you can use that find the things that are most interesting things in the sky. And then you can use your zoom lens — which is in this case the Spitzer Space Telescope — to zoom in and find out more about those targets of interest.
On infrared as a tool
It’s like approaching any sort of project. Let’s say you want to build a desk. You need a bunch of different kinds of tools if you’re going to be able to build a desk. You need saws, you need hammers, you need tape measures — you need a lot of things. And each one contributes something different, and it would be a lot harder to build the desk if you didn’t have, say a hammer. So for us, in astronomy, all the different wavelengths are just different tools, and they each bring something different to the table.
On appreciating home
It’s easy to overlook it, but when you spend most of your time looking at deep space, the Earth looks really wonderful.
