Snapshots: Soyuz takes off

United Launch Alliance called off the launch of a Delta 2 rocket from California’s Central Coast early Tuesday after boats ventured into a restricted safety exclusion zone and engineers ran out of time to resolve a technical problem on the launcher.

Making a fiery climb into a foggy sky Saturday over California’s Central Coast, a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket dispatched NASA’s InSight lander on a 301-million-mile voyage to Mars with a package of European-built instruments to probe the inside of the Red Planet.

Science teams from across the United States have submitted 28 proposals for missions to explore the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, touch the asteroid-like satellites orbiting Mars, visit unseen worlds and hunt for objects that could strike Earth one day.