Photos: Gantry retracted from Atlas 5 rocket

This is the ascent timeline to be followed by the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket in launching the Mobile User Objective System satellite No. 5 on Friday at 10:30 a.m. EDT (1430 GMT).

Technicians began the painstaking work of assembling a powerful Atlas 5 rocket today, a launcher that will deploy an advanced satellite to substantially improve U.S. weather forecasting.

Three rockets under the existing Block Buy between the Pentagon and United Launch Alliance have been assigned configurations and payloads.