A rocket carrying a NASA satellite lit up the pre-dawn skies Wednesday on a mission to track the chief culprit behind global warming.

The Delta 2 rocket blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base along the central California coast and speeded toward low-Earth orbit. It was to separate from the global warming satellite about an hour after liftoff.

Caribbean coral reefs could disappear within 20 years as overfishing has all but wiped out the fish that feast on coral-smothering algae, the U.N. and an international conservation watchdog warned Wednesday.

Just a sixth of the original coral cover exists today in the region, which is home to nine percent of the world's coral reefs, according to study by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the U.N.'s environment agency.

Unprecedented measurement of a deep-space comet has found the icy body to be losing about two small glasses of water every second, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Monday.

ESA's probe, Rosetta, made the measurements on June 6, when it aimed a microwave sensor at Comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko, on which it will land a probe in August after a 10-year space trek.

Plastic junk is floating widely on the world's oceans, but there's less of it than expected, a study says.

Such ocean pollution has drawn attention in recent years because of its potential harm to fish and other wildlife.

A water flow problem on Tuesday forced the US space agency to postpone the launch of a satellite to track atmospheric carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas.

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 was due to take off atop a Delta 2 rocket at 2:56 am Pacific time (0956 GMT) from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. But the operation was halted 46 seconds before scheduled liftoff time due to an issue with water flow to the rocket, NASA said.

Satellite images have found that Indonesia's ancient forests, a cradle of biodiversity and a buffer against climate change, have shrunk much faster than thought, scientists said on Sunday.

Between 2000 and 2012, Indonesia lost around 6.02 million hectares (14.4 million acres or 23,250 square miles) of primary forest, an area almost the size of Sri Lanka, they reported.

Global warming will send Antarctica's emperor penguins into decline by 2100, scientists projected Sunday, and called for the emblematic birds to be listed as endangered and their habitat better protected.

The world's largest penguin species came to global fame with a 2005 documentary, "March of the Penguins", portraying their annual trek across the icy wastes, and the 2006 cartoon movie "Happy Feet".

NASA has tested new technology designed to bring spacecraft — and one day even astronauts — safely down to Mars, with the agency declaring the experiment a qualified success even though a giant parachute got tangled on the way down.

Saturday's $150 million experiment is the first of three involving the Low Density Supersonic Decelerator vehicle. Tests are being conducted at high altitude on Earth to mimic descent through the thin atmosphere of the Red Planet.

Five years after a NASA satellite to track carbon dioxide plunged into the ocean after liftoff, the space agency is launching a carbon copy — this time on a different rocket.

The $468 million mission is designed to study the main driver of climate change emitted from smokestacks and tailpipes. Some of the carbon dioxide is sucked up by trees and oceans, and the rest is lofted into the atmosphere, trapping the sun's heat and warming the planet.

Hawaii's Board of Land and Natural Resources has approved a sublease for a $1.3 billion telescope that would be one of the world's largest, but the approval is on hold until the board hears objections in a separate review process.

The board met Friday to discuss issues raised previously about a plan to build the Thirty Meter Telescope on the summit of the Mauna Kea volcano on Hawaii's Big Island.