Photos: Tuesday’s Atlas 5 rollout

Two more Galileo satellites successfully catapulted into space from the French Guiana jungle aboard a Soyuz rocket Tuesday, putting Europe’s multibillion-dollar navigation system on track to begin limited global service later this year.

NASA managers Thursday cleared the $1.5 billion Parker Solar Probe for launch early Saturday on a daring mission to “touch the sun,” repeatedly flying through its outer atmosphere to find out why the blazing corona is millions of degrees hotter than our star’s visible surface.

Bulking up NASA’s constellation of tracking stations in the sky that provides critical links between orbiting spacecraft and ground control, a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket successfully deployed a new communications hub in space today.