Early Monday morning, NASA launched a spacecraft that will map the entire sky in infrared light with more sensitivity and resolution than has ever been possible before.
A Delta II rocket carrying NASA’s new Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 6:09 a.m. PST Monday and deposited the instrument into a polar orbit 326 miles above Earth. The space telescope is on a nine-month mission to record the infrared colors of the whole sky in greater detail than the previous infrared sky survey, conducted 26 years ago.
