Posted: Wed, Jun 26, 2013, 9:21 AM ET (1321 GMT)

A Soyuz rocket placed a Russian remote sensing satellite into orbit on Tuesday. The Soyuz-2.1b rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 1:28 pm EDT (1728 GMT, 11:28 pm local time) Tuesday and placed the Resurs P1 satellite into a Sun-synchronous orbit. The spacecraft is the first of a new generation of civil remote sensing satellites capable of providing images with resolutions of 1 meter per pixel.