Photos: California’s predawn liftoff of Atlas 5 rocket

United Launch Alliance teams began stacking an Atlas 5 rocket inside a vertical hangar at Cape Canaveral Monday in preparation for an early February launch with the Solar Orbiter spacecraft, a joint U.S.-European probe that will take the first pictures of the sun’s poles.

Presenting the results of an inquiry into a European Vega rocket failure last month, officials said Friday that misleading instructions and inadequate preflight checks caused teams to overlook wrongly-installed cables on the launcher’s upper stage steering system. Arianespace aims to resume Vega launches before the end of March.

The United Launch Alliance Delta 4 Medium+ (4,2) rocket lifted off at 12:52 a.m. EDT (0452 GMT) from Cape Canaveral for the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program.