Photos: Atlas 5 rocket soars

Good weather for launching a rocket is forecast for Cape Canaveral and the Space Coast on Thursday morning when a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 is scheduled to take flight.

Two CubeSats developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory launched May 5 with the InSight mission to Mars have deployed their miniaturized antennas and captured a distant family portrait of the Earth and the moon.

A break in thunderstorms streaming across Central Florida allowed a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon cargo capsule to blast off Thursday from Cape Canaveral in pursuit of the International Space Station with a new docking mechanism, a spacesuit and 40 mice acting as high-flying research specimens.