A reflecting telescope developed in Germany, which aims to improve water use on Earth, was sent to the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday.
An Antares 230 rocket with the private space freighter "Cygnus" and almost four tons of cargo took off as scheduled at 6:39 p.m. German time from Nasa's Wallops Island site in the US state of Virginia.
The departure went smoothly, as stated in a live broadcast by the US space agency Nasa on the Internet.
Arrival at the ISS is expected on Monday.
On board the capsule of the US aerospace company Northrop Grumman should be a prototype of a new measuring instrument from the company ConstellR from Freiburg, on which the Fraunhofer Institutes from Freiburg and Jena, among others, were involved.
In the future, it is to be installed in satellites with, among other things, a thermal infrared camera and a mini-computer for data processing, which will then collect data on the temperature on the earth's surface.
According to ConstellR, the values should help to better estimate water requirements and thus waste less water.
The data from space should be more detailed and available at shorter intervals than in comparable previous earth observation projects, it said.