CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA's final "Great Observatory" was lofted into orbit around the sun early Monday and will soon be training its infrared instruments on some of the coolest objects in the universe.
The Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF) took its ride atop a Boeing Delta 2 Heavy rocket, which appeared to work perfectly during the 50-minute satellite delivery mission.
Liftoff from complex 17 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station was right on time at 1:35:39 a.m. EDT (0535.39 GMT).
A rocketcam aboard the 13-story booster provided viewers of NASA TV with some brief scenes of the rocket climbing away from Florida's Space Coast and its solid rocket boosters separating.
The shot marked the 300th launch of the Delta program.
The Delta launch vehicle began in 1960 with a NASA program to modify the Army's Thor intermediate range ballistic missile. The first launch in May 1960 failed, but the second launch three months later was a success.
"It's great to have 300 launches behind us," said Rich Murphy, Boeing's director of Delta launch operations at the Cape. "It just makes me feel older since I've been around for most of them."
The 301st Delta is scheduled to launch Thursday from the Cape. A Delta 4 is to carry a military communications satellite.But the star of Monday's launch was the $1.2 billion SIRTF mission.
SIRTF's heat-sensitive equipment will concentrate on learning more about the universe by looking at it through infrared eyes in a level of detail never before accomplished in space.
"When it is launched we will have the capability to observe from space in the optical with the Hubble Space Telescope, in the X-ray with the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and finally in the infrared with SIRTF," said Anne Kinney, division director of astronomy and physics at NASA headquarters in Washington.
Scientists expect SIRTF to provide images that are visually and scientifically as grand as those Hubble has beamed back to Earth for the past decade -- prompting some to dub SIRTF a "son of Hubble."
"The difference is that Hubble just dips its toe into the infrared wavelength band, and SIRTF is right smack in the middle of it," said SIRTF project scientist Michael Werner.
The telescope's 33.5-inch (85-centimeter) mirror will allow it to peer back to the early universe, at objects that barely emit any heat, and through dusty clouds of interstellar material. As Werner puts it, SIRTF will explore "the old, the cold, and the dirty."
SIRTF will rely on three primary science instruments: an infrared camera, a far infrared camera and an infrared spectrograph.
And for the first time, NASA launched the science probe into what's called a "trailing Earth orbit." That means that SIRTF was placed into an orbit around the sun that matches Earth's orbit, but lags behind the home planet by several million miles.
Officials say this orbit provides simpler operations, allows a greater percentage of time for science observations and takes advantage of the cold of deep space to keep the heat-sensitive instruments supercool.
"We're really looking for that which is unseen," said David Gallagher, SIRTF project manager for NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
"We don't know what we're going to see," Gallagher said. "It's possible we'll be looking for one thing and see something else, and in the true spirit of astronomy while answering some questions I'm certain that we will pose new ones."
The first public release of any science is targeted for mid-December.
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