NASA will begin monitoring climate change on Earth from space with the successful launch of its Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2).

According to CNN, NASA plans on getting a high "vantage point" to observe carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The OCO-2 took off from Vandenberg Air Force Station in California Wednesday after the initial attempt was pushed back a day due to a water flow issue on the launch pad.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released an extensive report signaling the alarm for world leaders to make global warming reforms immediately. Carbon dioxide is one of the most prominent manmade greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere with an annual production of 40 million tons.

"We've been preparing for the OCO-2 mission for almost two years now," Tim Dunn, the mission's launch manager, said in a NASA press release. "The biggest challenge has been in bringing the Delta II launch vehicle out of retirement. The last time we launched on a Delta II was October 2011, a weather satellite."

OCO-2 will measure wavelengths of sunlight absorbed by the gas and will take detailed images of the atmosphere.

"There's quite a lot of urgency to see what we can get from a satellite like OCO-2," David Crisp, the science team lead for the OCO-2 mission, said in the release.

Gregg Marland, a geologist at Appalachian State University, agrees with the IPCC and said that humans have "tipped the balance." The new mission will try to regain the balance.

"If you visualize a column of air that stretches from Earth's surface to the top of the atmosphere, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 will identify how much of that vertical column is carbon dioxide," he told CNN. "It will act like a plane observing the smoke from forest fires down below, with the task of assessing where the fires are and how big they are."