Photos: Atlas 5 rocket soars

United Launch Alliance teams mounted a top secret payload for the National Reconnaissance Office on top of an Atlas 5 rocket Monday at Cape Canaveral in preparation for a liftoff scheduled just after sunset Nov. 3.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral at 6:28 a.m. EDT (1028 GMT) today to deploy the Mexican Morelos 3 mobile communications satellite.

Performing a successful spacelift mission for the U.S. spy satellite agency, an Atlas 5 rocket delivered a surveillance package into orbit today believed by analysts to be another pair of tandem sleuths to scoop up radio signals from adversarial ships at sea.