Photos: Tuesday’s Atlas 5 rollout

A Soyuz rocket took off from French Guiana on Thursday with the SES 15 communications satellite, a craft heading for an orbit more than 22,000 miles over the equator to provide airborne wifi and aeronautical navigation services over the United States.

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has been hoisted on top of its United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket at Cape Canaveral for liftoff this month, passing a major pre-launch milestone after teams repaired a small leak on the launch vehicle and overcame delays caused by coronavirus cases among staff working on the mission.

A powerhouse communications satellite with up to five times the capacity of most existing telecom craft reached orbit Wednesday after a nighttime blastoff from French Guiana aboard an Ariane 5 rocket, marking an auspicious start to the deployment of Intelsat’s $2 billion next-generation satellite network.