Engineers and scientists want to get WISE up as soon as possible so the spacecraft can begin scanning the sky for unseen stars and lurking asteroids.
Originally scheduled for launch Friday, the Colorado-built Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer won’t be sent aloft any earlier than Monday because of weather and a booster-engine glitch.
The $320 million NASA spacecraft was designed, fabricated and tested by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Broomfield. Ball landed the contract in 2003.
“We’re so excited,” said Joan Howard, Ball’s program manager for WISE. “We’ve worked on this for a long time.”
Currently, WISE is at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, perched on top of a Delta II rocket provided by United Launch Alliance of Centennial.
It will be placed in 326-mile- high orbit, where it will use an ultra-sensitive infrared telescope to pick up the glow of millions of objects, such as cooler stars called brown dwarfs, near-Earth asteroids and far-flung galaxies.
Howard said about 100 Ball employees have been involved with WISE, including 40 full-time workers.
The spacecraft, which weighs about 1,500 pounds and is about 9 feet long, has a structure that is glued instead of bolted together.
