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WIRE was the Wide-field InfraRed Explorer. I was a post-doc working on this project, specifically scheduling of filler (i.e. “snapshot”) programs, an advanced coadder, and on target selection. It was a very exciting launch (I was on the flight team as an instrument specialist at the control center at GSFC), but it all went south very quickly. If you really want to know, you can ask me the complicated story of why it failed. After more than 10 years in flight, it finally re-entered the atmosphere and was destroyed on May 9, 2011.



Here is some information pertaining to the WIRE project. Now that WIRE is gone, most of it is obsolete, but some of the information may still be relevant and/or interesting.