First Posted: Feb 11, 2013 10:33 PM EST

Landsat 8, the latest and most advanced satellite in the Landsat family, has made its way into orbit Monday, building up on a 40-year legacy of Earth’s monitoring satellites ...

Under mostly clear skies, Atlas 5, a United Launch Alliance rocket, was launched at 10:02am (PST) from its deployment center at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. It had a 78-minute flight ahead of it ...

... The National Aeronautics and Space Administration paid for the satellite, the instruments and the Atlas 5 rocket, performing overall systems engineering and controlling early orbit operations. The U.S. Geological Survey will take control of the spacecraft once it is commissioned and will be responsible for mission operations, data processing and archiving ...

http://www.scienceworldreport.com/ar...-satellite.htm