European Vega rocket returns to flight with the Phi-Sat satellite on board

Vega on its launch pad, before the launch of Sentinel-2, on June 23, 2015 (image of illustration). CC BY-SA 2.0

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Resumption of launch operations at the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana: the small European launcher Vega opens the ball with a launch scheduled for Saturday at 10.51 p.m. Kourou time, 03.51 a.m. Sunday morning Paris time. A new mission because it embeds two technologies that Europe is testing for the first time.

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The 16th mission of the Vega light launcher is far from being routine: the first European rocket to return to flight in many months, it embarked on board more than fifty satellites ranging from a few hundred grams to over 400 kilos.

This is unprecedented for this machine which therefore tests a new system to put all of this into orbit correctly.

In space, we like acronyms: this device is called SSMS and if it works as expected, Europe will be present on the market for multiple launches of small satellites, a booming market.

Among these devices is Phi-Sat, an Earth observation satellite. It embeds artificial intelligence software, this is the other novelty of this launch.

Phi-Sat will observe the evolution of vegetation and water quality, among others.
For this, he will have to take a considerable number of photos which he will then send to earth for analysis.

But here, in normal times, a good part of the pictures taken by such satellites are unusable for a simple reason: when there are clouds, you don't see much. This is where artificial intelligence comes in: it will be able to sort in orbit to send only usable data to the ground.

Also to be launched on @vega_sts # VV16 on Friday, the first AI technology carried on a European @ESA_EO mission, the pioneering ɸ-sat-1 (PhiSat-1) is the first experiment designed to improve efficiency in sending large amounts of data back to Earth 👉 https://t.co/kJyco4odyf pic.twitter.com/OTSWntFCDP

  ESA (@esa) June 16, 2020

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