Photos: Delta 2 rocket blasts off with SMAP satellite

A United Launch Atlas 5 rocket is set to dispatch NASA’s InSight lander toward Mars, kicking off an interplanetary journey from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

A NASA space telescope studying X-ray emissions from a nearby galaxy has discovered the brightest pulsar ever detected, the fast-spinning remnant of a collapsed star that shines so intensely it was initially mistaken for a massive black hole, a possible “missing link” between compact stellar-mass black holes and the unseen monsters lurking at the cores of many galaxies.

A space-bound NASA satellite was hauled aboard a military transport aircraft from a Southern California factory to the launch site in Florida on Friday and its United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket booster arrived by sea from the manufacturing plant in Alabama today.