The CHIPS spacecraft separated from the launch vehicle 83 minutes after launch at 6:08 p.m. PST. Initial contact with CHIPS was made 98 minutes after launch at 6:23 p.m. PST as the spacecraft passed over the University of California, Berkeley.

"The Delta vehicle gave us a great ride! The ICESat spacecraft was right where we expected and is performing great. The whole team is thrilled to be having such a wonderful start to our mission" said Jim Watzin, the ICESat Project Manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Over the next few days the ICESat spacecraft will gradually be despun and placed into a safe stable attitude. Within two weeks the onboard propulsion system will gradually tune the orbit . Once in its final orbital position, ICESat will be approximately 373 miles (600 kilometers) above the Earth.

ICESat is the latest in a series of Earth Observing System spacecraft, following the Terra satellite launched in December 1999, and the Aqua satellite launched earlier in May of this year. The primary role of ICESat is to quantify ice sheet growth or retreat and to thereby answer questions concerning many related aspects of the Earth's climate system, including global climate change and changes in sea level.

Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation (Ball) in Boulder, Colorado built the ICESat spacecraft. The Earth Science Data and Information System at NASA Goddard will provide space and ground network support and the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics will team with Ball to provide mission operations and flight dynamics support. The GLAS and ICESat data will be initially processed at the ICESat Investigator-led Processing System with support from the University of Texas, Center for Space Research. The mission data will be distributed and archived by the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Goddard manages the Earth Observing System for NASA's Earth Science Enterprise in Washington, D.C. More information about the ICESat program is available at:

http://ICESat.nasa.gov

More about NASA's Earth Science Enterprise can be found at: http://www.earth.nasa.gov

CHIPS will study the gas and dust in space, which are believed to be the basic building blocks of stars and planets. The CHIPS satellite, the first NASA University-Class Explorer (UNEX) mission, weighs 131 pounds (60 kilograms) and is the size of a large suitcase. It will orbit above the Earth at about 350 miles (590 kilometers) altitude and is expected to operate for one year.

CHIPS is sponsored by the Office of Space Science, NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C. The project is managed at the Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Va., and Goddard through the NASA Explorers Program. The CHIPS instrument was built at the Space Science Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, and SpaceDev, Inc. of Poway, Calif., built the spacecraft bus. For detailed information about CHIPS and its mission, go to:

http://chips.ssl.berkeley.edu

http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/2002/1217chips.html