Video: Atlas/Cygnus pre-launch news conference

Orbital ATK started work on two more surveillance satellites for the U.S. Air Force’s geosynchronous neighborhood watch program late last year as the military aims to expand its ability to track and investigate other objects in the heavily-trafficked belt more than 22,000 miles over the equator.

An hour after OSIRIS-REx separated from the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket on its trajectory to Asteroid Bennu, officials from NASA, the University of Arizona, ULA and Lockheed Martin held the post-launch news conference from Kennedy Space Center.

During a fourth spacewalk Saturday to wrap up repairs of the coolant system in a $2 billion cosmic ray detector, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano and Drew Morgan discovered a leak in one of eight coolant lines that were spliced into a new pump module during three earlier excursions. But Parmitano was able to tighten a fitting on the line and the astronauts were able to complete the repair work, setting the stage for the instrument to resume science operations.