Video: Preview briefing on NASA’s CYGNSS mission to improve hurricane forecasting

NASA, United Launch Alliance and Air Force officials hold the pre-launch news conference for the Delta 2 rocket with the agency’s SMAP environmental satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base on Jan. 27.

Eight miniature weather observatories, each the size of a piece of carry-on luggage, were installed on a specially-designed deployer module and mounted on the front end of an air-launched Pegasus XL rocket to prepare for Monday’s flight into orbit.

Astronauts have captured views of Hurricane Florence raging in the Atlantic Ocean and heading toward a likely landfall in the Carolinas on the U.S. East Coast, with one flight engineer calling the storm a “no-kidding nightmare.”