NASA's latest infrared space telescope—the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE—was launched on December 14, 2009. It recently began a six-month survey of the entire sky around Earth. With its unprecedented sensitivity, WISE will map the sky in wavelengths longer than the human eye can see, revealing previously unknown asteroids, brown dwarfs, and distant, dusty galaxies.

The WISE mission has partnered with the Hayden Planetarium to visualize these newly discovered objects in the Digital Universe 3-D Atlas. In anticipation, WISE team members created a simulation of WISE's potential brown dwarf discoveries. The Digital Universe team created a video fly-through of the simulated data, which is featured in the latest Astro Bulletin below. View the entire video, called The Solar Neighborhood After WISE, on the University of California's WISE website.

To learn about recent astronomical discoveries and other news about space, visit the Science Bulletins website.

Evidence is mounting of a widespread yet faint signature of water on Earth’s moon that is strongest near the poles. See the signature in the Astro Bulletin from October 19, 2009 along with recent images from NASA’s water-seeking LCROSS mission, which crashed part of its spacecraft into a frozen crater at the Moon’s south pole on October 9, 2009. We’ll be keen to know if LCROSS mission scientists confirm traces of water ice in the faint plume of debris kicked up by the impact. NASA will reveal results in the coming weeks.

This Astro Bulletin from July 21, 2008 highlights a previous discovery of lunar water dissolved inside tiny, glassy rocks that astronauts on the Apollo missions brought back from the Moon about 40 years ago. Clues to the water content in these volcanically formed beads have turned up since the 1980's, yet technology is only now sufficiently advanced to detect such trace amounts.

To learn about other recent astronomical discoveries, visit the Science Bulletins website.

In June, NASA is sending two satellites, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), to the Moon to prepare for a future astronaut landing. LRO will create the first-ever complete surface map of the Moon, and LCROSS will excavate a crater to confirm the presence of water on the Moon.

To learn about other recent astronomical discoveries, visit the Science Bulletins website.