After days of delay, Orbital ATK's CRS Orb-4 (for “commercial resupply services”) launched successfully from Space Launch Complex 41 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida this afternoon. The Cygnus spacecraft took flight atop a ULA-produced Atlas V rocket—an older launch vehicle with a relatively high success rate.
The supermassive black hole is 40 million times as massive as the sun and powers a quasar that existed 700 million years after the Big Bang.
The asteroid zoomed by Earth at a perfectly safe distance of around 1.8 million miles (2.9 kilometers).
Images show surprise changes to the spacecraft as it interacted with the atmosphere.
