LOS ANGELES, Dec. 14 (Xinhua) — NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) was launched early Monday on a mission to map the entire sky in infrared light.
Perched atop a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket, WISE blasted off from the Vandenberg Air Force Base, north of Santa Barbara, California.
The rocket is tilting toward the south, crossing the California coastline and heading out over the Pacific Ocean.
The launch had been scheduled for Dec. 11 but was delayed due to an anomaly in the motion of a booster steering engine.
The launch was successfully carried out after mission managers had completed a plan to resolve the anomaly, said the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) located in Pasadena, California, which is responsible for the mission.
The plan includes removing and replacing a suspect component on Friday, allowing the Delta II to carry out the task.
The launch went smoothly although the weather forecast had diminished slightly to 60-percent favorable conditions at launch time due to concern cumulus cloud cover, according to NASA.
As NASA’s newest spacecraft, WISE is on a short journey to its final Earth-circling orbit 525 kilometers (326 miles) overhead. It will spend the next nine months mapping the cosmos in infrared light. It will cover the whole sky one-and-a-half times and circle Earth over the poles, snapping millions of pictures of everything from near-Earth asteroids to faraway galaxies bursting with new stars.
“The last time we mapped the whole sky at these particular infrared wavelengths was 26 years ago,” said Edward (Ned) Wright of University of Californian in Los Angeles (UCLA), the principal investigator of the mission.
“Infrared technology has come a long way since then. The old all-sky infrared pictures were like impressionist paintings — now, we’ ll have images that look like actual photographs,” Wright said.
“We can help protect our Earth by learning more about the diversity of potentially hazardous asteroids and comets,” said Amy Mainzer, deputy project scientist for the mission at the JPL.
