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

A Vega rocket fired into space at 8:52 p.m. EST Monday (0152 GMT Tuesday) from the Guiana Space Center in South America, but the mission deviated from its planned trajectory. The rocket was boosting a Spanish Earth observation satellite and a French research payload into orbit.

SpaceX performed a hold-down test-firing Jan. 20 of a Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral in preparation for a launch with 60 Starlink broadband satellites, but officials delayed the missions’s planned launch Tuesday due to extreme weather in the downrange recovery zone for the first stage and payload fairing. The next possible launch attempt is expected at 9:49 a.m. EST (1449 GMT) Monday.

The scientist in charge of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission hopes to apply more than $30 million in leftover funding toward reducing the risk of the probe’s touch-and-go maneuver to snag a piece of asteroid Bennu, then eventually hire more experts to analyze the primordial specimens when they return to Earth in 2023.