CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A refurbished Titan 2 intercontinental ballistic missile successfully carried a new civilian weather satellite into polar Earth orbit Monday.

NASA will put the meteorological spacecraft, christened NOAA-M, through a series of tests over the next 45 days. Then the space agency will turn over operation of the satellite to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The NOAA-M mission patch.

At that point the $202 million robotic weather platform built by Lockheed Martin will be re-named NOAA-17 and begin service, providing scientists and forecasters with a constant stream of observations during the next four years or so.

NOAA-M is equipped with eight instruments that are to serve the science community and includes two additional instruments that act as radio relays for anyone signaling they are in trouble on land, sea or in the air.

"The satellite will enable continuity of data for monitoring events such as El Nino, droughts, volcanic ash, fires, and floods," said NOAA Administrator Conrad Lautenbacher.

"In addition, it will support the international search and rescue system by providing capabilities essential for detection and location of ships, aircraft, and people in distress," Lautenbacher said.

It is the third in a series of five Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites (POES) that are to be operated in space during the next decade.

NOAA-M replaces a satellite launched in May 1998 and is considered a "morning" satellite because every time it crosses the equator it is 10 a.m. in the time zone the spacecraft is above, said Mike Mignogno, NOAA's Polar Satellite Program Manager.

That time slot is a little later than the 7:30 a.m. orbit NOAA-M's predecessor was in, which changes the angle between the sunlight and the surface.

"Because of the better lighting at this time at 10 versus our normal morning satellite time of 7:30, we'll be able to generate better imagery-based products than we have in the past," Mignogno said.

Another NOAA spacecraft serves as the "evening" spacecraft and between the two satellites the entire surface of the planet can be monitored under different conditions.

NASA managed the $298 million satellite-delivery mission for NOAA, with the Air Force serving as the launch team for the Titan 2 rocket.

Liftoff of the historic Titan 2 from Space Launch Complex 4 West at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., came right on time at 2:23 p.m. EDT (2023 GMT).

A dense layer of fog hug close to the ground -- a Vandenberg trademark you can count on as much as afternoon thunderstorms over Cape Canaveral during the summer -- but the rocket had no trouble ignoring the poor visibility.

The two-stage rocket required six-and-a-half minutes to loft NOAA-M into space. A kick motor on the spacecraft itself finished the job minutes later and put NOAA-M into its final, circular orbit.

"It looks like everything is going right to plan, just the way it should," Marty Davis, a NASA mission manager, said shortly after the launch. "We've still got a lot of activity to go. None of the instruments are on."

Davis said it would take about three weeks to activate all systems and another few weeks before everything is calibrated and considered operational.

The Titan 2 used Monday sat beneath the ground in Little Rock, Arkansas from 1969 to 1987 with a nuclear warhead in its nosecone.

With the end of the Cold War the missile was deactivated, removed from its silo and shipped to Denver, where Lockheed Martin workers refurbished the hardware and transformed the Titan 2 from a missile to a rocket.

It was delivered to Vandenberg in 1996 and sat in storage until it was earmarked in 2001 for the NOAA-M mission.

So far 11 of these refurbished Titan 2s have been launched, all successfully.

The Titan 2 served NASA in 1965-1966, launching two unmanned and ten manned flights during Project Gemini, which paved the way for the Apollo moon landings later in the decade.