This image shows NASA's 40 cm diameter Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, telescope. The WISE telescope is an all aluminum optical system that will produce images of the sky with 2.75 arcsec resolution in four infrared spectral bands. Here the lead optical test engineer attaches the back-end imager optics to the afocal. This entire telescope will be mounted inside the WISE cryostat and cooled to about 17K. The WISE telescope was developed by L3 Communications-SSG.

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.