Snapshots from Atlas 5 launch

Twenty-eight thousand students across the United States submitted essays and proposed names for NASA’s newest Mars rover and on Thursday, the agency announced the winner: Perseverance, submitted by Virginia seventh-grader Alexander Mather.

With a 2-to-1 thrust-to-weight ratio, the million-pound United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket unleashed two-million pounds of ground-shaking thrust to power away from its seaside launch complex at 2:13 p.m. EST (1913 GMT) Sunday with the EchoStar 19 satellite.

Engineers scrambled to keep NASA’s billion-dollar asteroid-bound OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on track for its launch last week in the aftermath of an explosion a mile away at SpaceX’s launch pad at Cape Canaveral.