Spaceflight Now’s readers sent in photos from Thursday night’s launch of four NASA satellites aboard an Atlas 5 rocket, marking a fiery start to a mission probing the fundamental workings of the magnetic bubble shielding Earth from cosmic radiation.
The Atlas 5 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral’s Complex 41 launch pad at 10:44 p.m. EDT Thursday (0244 GMT Wednesday). The launcher’s RD-180 main engine and twin Aerojet Rocketdyne solid rocket motors gave the mission a boost out of the atmosphere, then a Centaur upper stage placed the four spacecraft into a highly elliptical orbit stretching some 40,000 miles above Earth.
Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.
