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Powered by two Russian-made RD-181 main engines, a Northrop Grumman Antares rocket fired into a mostly sunny sky Saturday afternoon over Virginia’s Eastern Shore carrying nearly 7,500 pounds of equipment to the International Space Station.

The twin-engine first stage ignited and throttled up to produce more than 860,000 pounds of thrust, pushing the 139-foot-tall (42.5-meter) Antares launcher skyward at 3:21 p.m. EST (2021 GMT) Saturday.

The launch kicked off Northrop Grumman’s 13th operational resupply mission to the space station. The Cygnus cargo freighter was loaded with a compact scanning electron microscope, a UK-built high-speed communications antenna, biological research experiments and three small satellites to be deployed from the space station for the U.S. military and NASA.

The Cygnus spaceship reached the space station early Tuesday.

Read our launch story for details on the mission.

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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.