Video: Halloween liftoff of Atlas 5 with GPS 2F-11

A Falcon 9 rocket soars skyward from Cape Canaveral carrying NASA’s TESS observatory on a mission to discover planets around other stars. This was the view from the Kennedy Space Center Press Site.

Now cocooned inside a heat shield and the nose shroud of an Atlas 5 rocket that will send it to Mars, NASA’s InSight lander is awaiting launch May 5 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.

Spaceflight Now’s readers sent in photos from Thursday night’s launch of four NASA satellites aboard an Atlas 5 rocket, marking a fiery start to a mission probing the fundamental workings of the magnetic bubble shielding Earth from cosmic radiation.