NASA's most recent mapping mission took off on Monday, with the successful launch of its new infrared space telescope, Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base.

The 1,485-pound WISE was carried into the 326-miles-above-Earth polar orbit by a Delta II rocket at 6:09 a. m. Pacific time. Within nearly eight minutes, the craft entered space. Almost an hour into the flight, its second-stage rocket re-ignited and placed the vehicle into its assigned polar orbit.

The WISE mission, costing $320-million, has been designed to last 10 months in space or till the time the frozen hydrogen warms up. The spacecraft will photograph the complete sky one-and-a
-half times, during which it will detect the infrared glow emerging from comets and asteroids in the galaxy.

Likely to reach furthermost in the universe, the WISE will expectedly trace the most far-flung and obscure star clusters, and distant galaxies located nearly 10 billion light years away from the Earth, and emitting almost trillion times more light than the Sun.

Talking about the smooth and successful take-off of the WISE, William Irace, the NASA sky-mapping mission's project manager at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said: "WISE thundered overhead, lighting up the pre-dawn skies. All systems are looking good, and we are on our way to seeing the entire sky better than ever before."