Cayenne (AFP)
The launch of the Soyuz rocket scheduled for the night of Monday to Tuesday in French Guiana to put into orbit a military Earth observation satellite of the United Arab Emirates, has again been postponed due to a technical problem, said Arianespace.
The company which markets the launches said in a statement to have "decided to interrupt the final chronology" of the shooting, "5 minutes and 3 seconds before takeoff", which was scheduled for Monday at 22:33 in Guyana (1:33 GMT Tuesday).
This shooting had already been postponed, Sunday evening, because of unfavorable weather and a risk of lightning strike in flight.
This time, the reason for the postponement invoked is a problem in receiving data.
"The launcher was sending data but the backup service was not receiving it," Arianespace told AFP.
This backup service is "a CNES (National Center for Space Studies) service responsible for neutralizing the launcher - which does not necessarily mean its destruction in flight, it can be stopping the engines or otherwise - and this service needs the launcher's data, "it was further specified within Arianespace.
For this type of launch, at a precise time without a firing window, any stop in the chronology is equivalent to a postponement of the firing.
"The orbits of this type of optical satellite in low orbit require launching at a precise moment, which is not the case with geostationary satellites, for example," Arianespace added.
Arianespace announces that it is aiming for a new shot at the same time, Tuesday at 10:33 p.m. Guyana time (1:33 GMT Wednesday).
The United Arab Emirates wanted to delay as long as possible any publicity around the precise date of the launch of their FalconEye military satellite, after losing an identical satellite during the first failure of the Vega light launcher, then for the first time out of its path in July 2019.
The identity of the satellite to be launched by Soyuz did not appear until Sunday on the Arianespace site.
© 2020 AFP