GLAST Launch Day
June 11, 2008 - 8:15 a.m. EDT
The liftoff of NASA's Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) spacecraft remains on schedule today. The launch window opens at 11:45 a.m. and extends to 1:40 p.m. EDT.
GLAST will be launched aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket from Launch Pad 17-B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on the sunny east coast of central Florida.
Early this morning the mobile service tower was retracted from around the rocket to allow fueling of liquid oxygen, for the final phase of the launch countdown.
The sky is brilliant at this time with a 40 percent chance of weather concerns to hinder today's launch.
With high sensitivity GLAST is the first imaging gamma-ray observatory to survey the entire sky every day. It will give scientists a unique opportunity to learn about the ever-changing universe at extreme energies. GLAST will detect thousands of gamma-ray sources, most of which will be supermassive black holes in the cores of distant galaxies.
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