A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket climbs away from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on March 12, 2015. The rocket carried four NASA science satellites designed to study how the sun's magnetic field interacts with Earth's. NASA TV

Kicking off a $1.1 billion mission, a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket streaked into space Thursday, boosting four NASA satellites into orbit to study interactions between Earth's magnetic field and the sun's, which generate the titanic energy discharges that drive auroras and play havoc with satellite navigation, communications and power grids.

The hard-to-study mechanism underlying space weather is known as magnetic reconnection, and it is the focus of NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale -- MMS -- mission, a long-awaited project to reveal the underlying physics powering Earth's space environment.

Carrying the four MMS satellites stacked one atop the other in a protective nose cone fairing, the Atlas 5 roared to life and climbed away from pad 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 10:44 p.m. EDT (GMT-4). Thirteen minutes later, after the first of two Centaur second stage engine firings, the rocket and its satellite payload were safely in orbit.

The four satellites making up NASA's $1.1 billion Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, or MMS, are stacked for launch Thursday in the nose of an Atlas 5 rocket. The satellites will work in concert to study the underlying physics of explosive interactions between the sun's magnetic field and Earth's.

NASA

After a second Centaur engine firing, the satellites, built at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., were released at five-minute intervals starting about one hour and 32 minutes after liftoff.

"The spin rates, the attitude, it was essentially a flawless delivery of our four satellites," said Craig Tooley, NASA MMS project manager at Goddard. "They're all healthy and turned on."

Each 3,000-pound, 12-foot-wide satellite features a suite of sensitive instruments and eight extendable antenna-like booms: four 197-foot-long radial wire booms and two 41-foot axial extensions for electric field sensors and two 16-foot booms carrying magnetometers.

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NASA launches satellites to probe magnetic mystery