Photos: Atlas 5 rocket soars from West Coast

Ready for a journey into the sun’s enigmatic, scorching corona, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has been encapsulated inside the nose cone of its Delta 4-Heavy rocket for liftoff Saturday.

A pair of European-built, NASA-backed research satellites set for launch Tuesday from California will extend 15 years of global gravity field measurements collected by the GRACE mission before it ended last year, supplying scientists with data to help track the melting of Earth’s ice sheets and chart the impacts of floods and droughts.

After calling a hold less than a minute before liftoff Friday, SpaceX launched the Maxar-built SXM 7 radio broadcasting satellite for SiriusXM Sunday. A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral at 12:30 p.m. EST (1730 GMT).