Wide-field Infrared Explorer (WIRE, also Explorer 75 and SMEX-5) was a NASA satellite launched on 5 March 1999, on the Pegasus XL launch vehicle into polar orbit between above the surface of Earth. WIRE was intended to be a four-month infrared survey of the entire sky at 21-27 µm and 9-15 µm, specifically focusing on starburst galaxies and luminous protogalaxies. WIRE had problems and was unable to carry out its IR survey, and was deactivated on 30 September 2000, and finally reentered and burned up in 2011. Science The science team was based at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) in Pasadena, California. Flight operations, integration, and testing were from Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The telescope was built by Space Dynamics Laboratory in Utah. Premature ejection of the spacecraft aperture cover led to depletion of the solid hydrogen shortly after launch, ending the primary science mission. The onboard star tracker remained functional, and was used for long-term precision photometric monitoring of bright stars in support of an asteroseismology program. WIRE reentered atmosphere of Earth on 10 May 2011 (around 07:00 UTC). The Wide-field Infrared Explorer (WIRE) was a two-color, solid hydrogen-cooled, infrared imaging telescope designed to study starburst galaxies and to search for protogalaxies. The science goals of WIRE were to: 1) determine what fraction of the luminosity of the universe at a redshift of >0.5 is due to starburst galaxies; 2) assess how fast and in what ways starburst galaxies evolve; and, 3) examine whether luminous protogalaxies are common at redshifts <3. In order to accomplish these goals, WIRE was to conduct a four month survey at 12- and 25-µm over an area of between ten and several hundred square degrees of the sky. WIRE telescope The WIRE telescope itself had an entrance aperture of and a 32 x 32 arcminutes field of view (FoV). It was of a Ritchey–Chrétien telescope design with no moving parts and no reimaging optics. Shortly after launch, while the spacecraft was still tumbling early after orbit insertion, the telescope cover came off prematurely. This resulted in the exposure of the cryogenic materials to light, warming them at a high rate causing outgassing and increasing the rate of spin of the spacecraft beyond the ability of the reaction wheels to slow it. Although ground controllers began work to decrease the excess spin of the spacecraft, they were not able to do