  NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft has been brought
out of hibernation and has resumed surveying the sky at 3.4 and 4.6 um. The
scientific objectives of the NEOWISE reactivation mission are to detect, track,
and characterize near-Earth asteroids and comets. The search for minor planets
resumed on December 23, 2013, and the first new near-Earth object (NEO) was
discovered six days later. As an infrared survey, NEOWISE detects asteroids
based on their thermal emission and is equally sensitive to high and low albedo
objects; consequently, NEOWISE-discovered NEOs tend to be large and dark. Over
the course of its three-year mission, NEOWISE will determine
radiometrically-derived diameters and albedos for approximately 2000 NEOs and
tens of thousands of Main Belt asteroids. The 32 months of hibernation have had
no significant effect on the mission's performance. Image quality, sensitivity,
photometric and astrometric accuracy, completeness, and the rate of minor
planet detections are all essentially unchanged from the prime mission's
post-cryogenic phase.
