Photos: Delta 4 lights up the sky for night owl launch

A day-and-a-half before its liftoff with a U.S. Air Force communications satellite, a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket rolled out to its launch pad at Cape Canaveral on Monday morning.

Four magnetic explosion probes in a towering stack atop an Atlas 5 rocket rode a fountain of flame off the launch pad and into Earth orbit Thursday night for a $1.1 billion NASA science investigation into a universal force of nature.

The United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, standing 189 feet tall and and weighing 720,000 pounds, unleashes 860,000 pounds of thrust from its main engine at 10:30 a.m. local time (1:30 p.m. EST; 1830 GMT) today to launch the commercial WorldView 4 Earth-imaging satellite for DigitalGlobe from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.