It was launched on 12 January 2003 from Vandenberg Air Force Base aboard a Delta II with the larger satellite ICESat, and had an intended mission duration of one year.

[2] The primary objective of the science team, led by principal investigator Mark Hurwitz, was to study the million-degree gas in the local interstellar medium.

CHIPS was designed to capture the first spectra of the faint, extreme ultraviolet glow that is expected to be emitted by the hot interstellar gas within about 300 light-years of the Sun, a region often referred to as the Local Bubble.

The University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) served as CHIP's primary ground station and manufactured the CHIPS spectrograph, designed to perform all-sky spectroscopy.

CHIPS (Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer) is a NASA astrophysics spacecraft that was launched by a Delta II launch vehicle from Vandenberg Air Force Base at 00:45:00 UTC on 13 January 2003.