Space: the Vega rocket successfully puts its satellites into orbit

Successful launch for the Vega rocket in Kourou in Guyana on September 3, 2020. Youtube / Ariane Group

Text by: RFI Follow

3 min

The Vega rocket succeeded in its mission on the night of Wednesday to Thursday by placing in orbit its fifty satellites in Kourou in Guyana.

This first space charter for Europeans had seen its launch postponed many times due to the weather.

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The European launcher, the lightest in the Arianespace range, performed flawlessly after a flight of just under two hours.

Forty minutes after takeoff, in a sequence of about ten minutes, Vega carried out, as planned, a first series of orbiting, for the seven microsatellites on board, revealing the first smiles under the masks of the engineers of the Jupiter control center in Kourou.

46 nano-satellites in orbit

An hour later, two minutes apart, the lightest launchers in the Arianespace range separated from the two Cubesats for a total of 46 nano-satellites.

This mission, VV16, is a validation flight of the new European small satellite launch service.

Jan Wörner, Director General of the European Space Agency, did not hide his relief.

Returning to the shared launch project, he referred to " 

 ", nearly a year after the failure of flight 15. " 

 ", underlined Jan Wörner.

21 different clients

This success was all the more important for Arianespace as the mission involved 21 customers from 13 different countries.

The applications of nano and micro-satellites range from Earth observation to communication, through technological development and scientific research.

With this new platform dedicated to small satellite launches, Arianespace fully intends to score points in this booming nano and micro-satellite market.

In this new market, competition rages with particular

.

The launch

particular for weather problems.

The latest postponement on Tuesday was due to a typhoon passing over a tracking station in South Korea.

Before that, there was the Covid-19 crisis, then particularly unfavorable weather conditions, with strong high altitude winds, this summer over Guyana.

(With

AFP)

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