NASA's DART spacecraft and the 2nd stage booster captured 'captured about 10 hours after launch," by the Virtual Telescope Project. Credit: Space.com | footage courtesy: Gianluca Masi / Virtual Telesc

One of these ride-along NASA efforts is the Athena EPIC (Economical Payload Integration Cost) SmallSat, which will demonstrate a new way of more efficiently placing remote-sensing (or rather, Earth-observing) instruments into orbit.

Two NASA satellites rocketed into orbit from California aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday, commencing a $170 million mission to study a phenomenon of space physics that has eluded researchers since the dawn of the Space Age.