This is the launch timeline to be followed by the Atlas 5 rocket’s ascent into orbit from Cape Canaveral with the European-built Solar Orbiter spacecraft to study the sun.
Launch is scheduled 11:03 p.m. EST Sunday (0403 GMT Monday) at the opening of a two-hour launch window.
The 189-foot-tall (57.6-meter) rocket will arc to the southeast from Florida’s Space Coast on its first flight of the year. It will be the 82nd Atlas 5 launch overall since United Launch Alliance’s workhorse rocket debuted in August 2002.
The timeline below ends with the conclusion of the primary mission, the deployment of the Solar Orbiter spacecraft on an interplanetary escape trajectory into heliocentric orbit to begin its mission studying the sun.
SpaceX brought another Falcon 9 booster into Port Canaveral on Wednesday, a little more than two days after landing the rocket on a platform in the Atlantic Ocean as the company enters an unusually quiescent period of launch activity in Florida — at least by recent standards.
Equipped with a robot arm, sample collector and return capsule, NASA’s asteroid-bound OSIRIS-REx probe emerged from its pristine factory and flew to the launch site in Florida on Friday.
In a commercial push to return to the Moon while celebrating the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, Astrobotic Technology Inc. has contracted with United Launch Alliance to use an Atlas 5 rocket to send the Peregrine lander to the lunar surface in 2019.