Photos: Atlas 5 rocket soars

The fifth satellite for India’s regional navigation network rode into orbit Wednesday aboard a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, joining a growing fleet of spacecraft to provide positioning services to users across South Asia.

SpaceX’s launch team in Cape Canaveral fueled a Falcon 9 rocket with super-chilled liquid propellants and briefly fired the first stage’s nine Merlin engines Monday in a customary preflight test ahead of Wednesday’s scheduled liftoff of a commercial television broadcasting satellite for the Asia-Pacific.

A shoebox-sized satellite conceived and funded by members of the Planetary Society, an advocacy organization co-founded by Carl Sagan, is fastened to an Atlas 5 rocket for launch Wednesday to test one of the late celebrity-astronomer’s futuristic concepts for exploring the cosmos.