Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. .

Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. – At Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, technicians install the avionics shelf on the third stage of the Orbital Sciences Corp. Pegasus XL rocket which will launch the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, spacecraft.

Scheduled for launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base no earlier than Feb. 27, 2013, IRIS will open a new window of discovery by tracing the flow of energy and plasma through the chromospheres and transition region into the sun’s corona using spectrometry and imaging. IRIS fills a crucial gap in our ability to advance studies of the sun-to-Earth connection by tracing the flow of energy and plasma through the foundation of the corona and the region around the sun known as the heliosphere. For more information, visit http://iris.gsfc.nasa.gov Photo credit: NASA/Randy Beaudoin