Video: Tower rollback prior to launch of Mars Pathfinder atop a Delta 2

NASA has decommissioned a long-lived satellite launched in 2000 that demonstrated remote sensing and surveying instruments and techniques common in today’s orbiting Earth observatories.

Ground crews at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California retracted a mobile gantry away from the Delta 2 rocket Monday afternoon, revealing the 128-foot-tall (39-meter) booster on its launch pad awaiting liftoff with a new polar-orbiting weather observatory.

NOAA’s new JPSS 1 weather satellite deployed from its Delta 2 launcher in an orbit more than 500 miles above Earth nearly one hour after blasting off from California.