Photos: Most powerful Atlas 5 puts 15,000-pound satellite in orbit

This is the ascent timeline to be followed by the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket in launching NASA’s MMS mission on March 12 at 10:44 p.m. EDT.

The detective work into the Atlas 5 rocket’s first stage performance trouble during the Cygnus cargo ship launch a week ago has implicated the fuel system as the likely culprit for using up the liquid oxygen supply too quickly.

NASA has selected two robotic missions to visit asteroids in the early 2020s from a field of proposed interplanetary probes, approving projects to explore a metallic relic from the early solar system and a half-dozen so-called Trojan objects left over from the formation of the outer planets.