The GLAST spacecraft and Delta II rocket blasts off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, June 11, 2008.(Xinhua/Reuters Photo) Photo Gallery>>>

    WASHINGTON, June 11 (Xinhua) -- NASA's latest space telescope, the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) lift off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 12:05 p.m. EDT (1605 GMT) on Wednesday, according to NASA TV.

    After a series of delays, GLAST finally got off the ground atop a Delta 2-Heavey rocket. The telescope is about 2.8 meters high by2.5 meters in diameter when stowed in the fairing section of the rocket.

    By about 75 minutes after launch, GLAST will be put into orbit approximately 350 miles (about 565 kilometers) high over the Earth's surface. It will become a little bit taller and much wider when the Ku-band antenna deploys and the solar arrays are extended in space.

    It will circle the Earth every 90 minutes. Its orbit will be at an inclination of approximately 25.6 degrees to the equator.

The U.S. gamma-ray telescope GLAST was launched into space Wednesday on a Delta 2 missile from the army base at Cape Canaveral, Florida, NASA television said.(Xinhua/AFP Photo) Photo Gallery>>>

   Unlike many telescopes that have a very narrow field of view, GLAST has a very wide field of view. The telescope will survey the universe over an energy range from 20 million electron volts to over 300 billion electron volts, the upper end of which is a relatively unexplored area of the electromagnetic spectrum, according to Dr. Steven Ritz, GLAST project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

    This will allow GLAST to view the entire celestial sphere every three hours. With high sensitivity, GLAST is the first imaging gamma-ray observatory to survey the entire sky every day. "GLAST enables scientists to look under the hood and see how the universe works," Ritz said.

    GLAST does not have a lens like regular telescope. In fact, it converts Gamma rays to electrons and positrons to infer the direction from which the gamma-ray came.

    GLAST follows NASA's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, which was deorbited and plummeted into ocean in 2000. This new Gamma rays telescope, thanks to advancements in technologies, promises to provide a far sharper insight into universe's most extreme and powerful objects like monstrous black holes, spinning neutron stars and gamma-ray bursts.

    The mission is developed by NASA in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, along with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden.

    "It took a lot of people in many countries to make this 16-yearjourney come to fruition," said Peter Michelson, the principal investigator of GLAST.