Photos: Atlas 5 powers NRO payload into the night

A NASA spacecraft being readied for launch in 2018 will make repeated trips through the sun’s outer atmosphere, passing within 4 million miles of the star’s blazing surface at more than 430,000 mph to shed light on what powers the sun’s high-temperature corona, the origins of the solar wind and the causes of potentially catastrophic solar storms.

SpaceX will go for another first Thursday, this time flying a refurbished Dragon supply ship carrying nearly 6,000 pounds of cargo and experiments to the International Space Station nearly three years after its first mission.

An Atlas 5 rocket carrying a classified national security satellite was rolled to the launch pad this morning for Thursday’s flight to bolster the U.S. intelligence-gathering space architecture.