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 The 127-foot-tall (39-metre) rocket, built and flown by United
Launch Alliance, is scheduled to lift off from Vandenberg Air Force
Base in California at 6:20 a.m. PST (1420 GMT).
Launch originally was planned for Thursday but was delayed 24 hours
due to high winds, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
said.
United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing,
postponed the flight for one more day so that technicians could
repair insulation on the rocket that had become detached during
Thursday’s launch attempt.
Perched on top of the rocket is NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive
observatory, or SMAP, which is to spend at least three years making
precise measurements of the amount of water in Earth’s topsoil.
 Soil moisture accounts for less than 1 percent of the planet’s total
water reservoir, with 97 percent in the Earth's oceans and nearly
all of the rest locked in ice, said SMAP lead scientist Dara
Entekhabi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
But the tiny amount of soil moisture links the planet’s overall
environmental systems, its water, energy and carbon cycles, as well
as determines whether particular regions are hit by drought or
flooding. “It’s the metabolism of the system,” Entekhabi said during
a prelaunch news conference.
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Currently, scientists rely largely on computer models to account for
soil moisture. SMAP is designed to provide hard numbers of the
amount of water in the soil and to do so worldwide, every two to
three days.
The launch, 2,100-pound (950-kg) spacecraft and three years of
operations is costing NASA $916 million.
(Reporting by Irene Klotz in Cape Canaveral, Florida; Editing by
Jonathan Oatis)
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