Vandenberg Air Force officials are celebrating a successful final launch of the year.
On the morning of Dec. 14, mission planners launched a Delta II rocket from Space Launch Complex 2. The rocket is carrying NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite.
Now that it’s in orbit, the WISE satellite will scan the entire sky with ultra-sensitive infrared, picking up the glow of hundreds of millions of objects and producing millions of images for NASA. According to a press release from Vandenberg, these images will help scientists answer important questions about the origins of planets, stars, and galaxies, and provide data for astronomers.
Vandenberg Air Force Base is next scheduled to launch an Interceptor rocket on Jan. 22, 2010.
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This article appears in Dec 17-24, 2009.