Snapshots from Atlas 5 launch

The Atlas 5 countdown leading up to Friday’s early morning liftoff from Cape Canaveral with Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule will be several hours longer than usual.

Ground controllers have beamed the final commands to NASA’s Kepler telescope, turning off the spacecraft’s transmitters and disabling the craft’s automatic recovery software after the planet-hunting observatory ran out of fuel last month.

The work isn’t over for NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter. Engineers hope to fly the rotorcraft four more times in the next two weeks before calling it quits on the pioneering technology experiment, which accomplished the first powered flight of an aircraft on another planet Monday.