Photos: Tuesday’s Atlas 5 rollout

Relive Tuesday night’s spectactular liftoff of the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket carrying the Cygnus cargo ship with this series of replays.

This is our comprehensive fact sheet previewing the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket deployment of the classified NROL-52 payload for the National Reconnaissance Office.

What began as a concept scribbled on a cocktail napkin in a Tucson bar 12 years ago — sending a spacecraft to an asteroid and retrieving a pristine sample to bring back to Earth for study — becomes reality Thursday with the launch of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission.