Photos: Predawn launch of Atlas 5

The Falcon 9 rocket set to launch the SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule on a test flight in February briefly ignited its Merlin main engines on pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday. The Crew Dragon test flight to the International Space Station is a precursor to the spaceship’s first mission with astronauts later this year.

Five satellites rode a Long March 2D rocket into orbit Monday from the Jiuquan launch base in northwestern China, including a pathfinder for a planned constellation of low-altitude relay satellites and a mysterious spacecraft ambiguously described by Chinese state media.

Bruce Banerdt leads the InSight science team, and is in charge of the lander heading for Mars to study the red planet’s interior structure, collecting data that should yield new information about the environment in the early solar system, when planets coalesced and formed 4.5 billion years ago.