CS Knowledge Base

As of 2023 Atlas V has made 97 flights. The most famous ones carried the New Horizons, Mars Science Laboratory (which had the Curiosity rover in it), Juno, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter/LCROSS, the Boeing X-37B, the Mars 2020 mission which carried the Perseverance rover and the Mars Helicopter Ingenuity, Boeing's CST-100 Starliner.

The Atlas V has a special way of naming the different kinds. The Atlas V nomenclature for numbering the variants goes like this: The first number says how wide the fairing is. A 400 series Atlas V has a 4-meter wide fairing. A 500 series Atlas V has a 5-meter wide fairing. An Atlas V N22 have no fairing since it will be the launch configuration for the Boeing's CST-100 Starliner. second number says how many strap-on solid rocket boosters the rocket has. An Atlas V 501 has no strap-on boosters, an Atlas V 441 has 4 strap-on boosters, while the Atlas V N22 has two strap-on boosters, which will be the Boeing Starliner launch configuration. The last number says how many engines the Centaur second stage has. All of the Atlas V rockets flown have had only 1 engine on the Centaur, but in the future other Atlas V rockets will have 2 engines on the Centaur upper stage, such as the Atlas V N22 that I frequently mentioned in this article. There is also the HLV which has two of the first stage (Common Core Booster) strapped on like strap-on boosters, but it has never flown.

• Juno
• Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
• Mars Science Laboratory
• NASA
• New Horizons