Military Weather Satellite Launched After 15-Year Hold
Gene Blevins / Reuters
A U.S. military weather satellite, refurbished after more than a decade in storage, blasted off aboard an unmanned Atlas 5 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Thursday.
The
rocket put the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program spacecraft into
a 530-mile-high orbit passing over Earth's poles. The $518 million
satellite, known as DMSP-19 and built by Lockheed Martin, joins six
other operational DMSP satellites already in orbit.
The U.S. Air Force was
prepared to launch DMSP-19 about 15 years ago — but the satellites in
orbit were lasting much longer than expected, so it went into storage
instead.
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