Finally, after a five-year delay, the $1.5 billion NASA Earth-observing satellite will be launched Oct. 28 from California. The satellite is aimed to test new technologies to improve weather forecasts and monitor climate change.

About the size of a small school bus, the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project - NPP for short, carries five different types of instruments to collect environmental data, including four that never before have flown into space.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) meteorologists plan to feed the data into their weather models to better anticipate and track hurricanes, tornadoes and other extreme weather.

"The information will help us understand what tomorrow will bring, whether it's the next-day forecast or long-term climate change," said Andrew Carson, the mission's program executive at NASA headquarters.

The satellite lifted off before dawn Friday from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., aboard a Delta 2 rocket that will boost it into an orbit some 500 miles high.

With the world experiencing weather extremes such as the Midwest tornado outbreak to Southwest wildfires and hurricanes in New England, the launch of the satellite could not have come at a more appropriate time.

"We've already had 10 separate weather events, each inflicting at least $1 billion in damages," said Louis Uccellini of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The satellite will spend the next five years circling the Earth from pole to pole about a dozen times a day. The information collected will then be transmitted to a ground station in Norway and routed to the United States via fiber optic cable.

NASA will manage the mission for the first three months before turning it over to NOAA.

NASA invested about $895 million in the mission while NOAA and the Air Force contributed $677 million for this project.