The Vega rocket ready for launch with satellites for Spain and France – Spaceflight Now

A Spanish spacecraft for Earth observation and a French research satellite to probe light phenomena above thunderstorms are packed inside the cone of an Italian-built Vega rocket for launch Monday night from French Guiana.

The two satellites will share the journey into orbit after the Vega rocket takes off from the Guiana Space Center on the northeastern coast of South America at 20:52:20 EST on Monday (0152:20 GMT on Tuesday).

The Spanish SEOSAT-Ingenio satellite will travel in the upper position of the Vega rocket’s Vespa dual payload dispenser, while the French research payload Taranis will be launched into the lower berth of the Vega payload cover.

The 98-foot (30-meter) tall Vega launcher, developed by the Italian aerospace company Avio, will take off with its 17th flight on Monday night.

Three solid fuel stages will propel the rocket north of French Guiana over the Atlantic Ocean, then the hydrazine-fueled upper stage will fire four times to inject the SEOSAT-Ingenio and Taranis satellites into two slightly different polar orbits.

If all goes according to plan, the upper stage of the Vega rocket will deploy SEOSAT-Ingenio at 9:46 PM EST (0246 GMT) in a 416-mile (760-kilometer) orbit with an inclination of 98.09 degrees relative to the equator. . After a second pair of orbital adjustment burns, the upper stage will release Taranis at 22:34 EST (0334 GMT) into a slightly higher orbit of 420 miles with an inclination of 98.19 degrees.

A final burn from the upper stage will deorbit the rocket’s body into Earth’s atmosphere to prevent it from becoming another piece of space junk.

SEOSAT-Ingenio, built by Airbus in Spain, weighs around 1,650 pounds (750 kilograms), according to a press kit released by Arianespace, the launch services provider for the mission. Carrying two optical cameras, the satellite will have an image resolution of approximately 8.2 feet, or 2.5 meters, in black and white. Its cameras take photos along stretches of 55 kilometers wide.

The spacecraft’s observation instrument will also collect data in the blue, green, red, and near-infrared wavelengths, and the satellite is designed to be able to look sideways at the image regions on each side of its ground track. The mission data will help scientists, policymakers, and other users track changes in land use.

SEOSAT-Ingenio “will provide our company with a very broad range of optical images for many applications such as land use, border control, climate change and security,” said Jorge Lomba Ferreras, head of the aerospace programs department of CDTI, Center for the development of industrial technology, part of the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.

Designed primarily for civilian use, SEOSAT-Ingenio will also collect images for the European Commission’s Copernicus program, which includes a fleet of dedicated Sentinel environmental monitoring satellites. As a contributing mission in the Copernicus fleet, SEOSAT-Ingenio will integrate data collected by Sentinel satellites distributed worldwide and free of charge.

“SEOSAT is a very versatile satellite and serves many application domains, from agriculture to disaster management, even fishing, forest fires, there are many (areas) where SEOSAT can be used,” said Josef Aschbacher, director of the Earth observation programs at the European Space Agency.

ESA managed the development of the SEOSAT-Ingenio on behalf of the Spanish government, which financed the mission and owns the satellite. ESA also organized the data pipeline to distribute SEOSAT-Ingenio images to global users, and ESA operators in Germany will oversee the activation and commissioning of the satellite after launch, before handing over control to engineers. Spanish.

Designed for a mission of at least seven years, the spacecraft will primarily acquire images over Spain, other parts of Europe, North Africa and Latin America. But SEOSAT-Ingenio’s orbit allows for worldwide coverage and its geographic reach will cover the globe.

“SEOSAT-Ingenio will help us better understand climate change,” Aschbacher said. “For example, an important parameter in climate change is land use change, the shift from agricultural to urban areas or from wooded to non-forested areas. SEOSAT, through its routine operations and routine monitoring of the earth’s surface, certainly helps a lot to better understand a very important parameter of climate change “.

Another goal of the SEOSAT-Ingenio project, initiated by the Spanish government in 2007, was to promote a growing Spanish space industry. According to Lomba Ferreras, about 80% of the spacecraft was manufactured in Spain, while the previous Spanish government satellites were only about half produced in Spain.

SEOSAT-Ingenio’s first test images should be downlinked within two to three weeks of launch, Lomba Ferreras said at a pre-launch virtual press conference on Monday. The satellite is expected to be fully operational by April 2021, he said.

Juan Carlos Cortés, director of space and dual programs at CDTI, said the SEOSAT-Ingenio project cost around 200 million euros, or 236 million dollars.

The French research satellite Taranis is launching a mission to trace the origins of mysterious light phenomena above thunderstorms. These transient light events, or TLEs, are electrical discharges that last only milliseconds, and scientists are unsure of the mechanisms and physics that produce them.

TLEs that manifest as red sprites and blue jets are sometimes seen on dark nights, especially from airplanes. Phenomena known as elves are the most difficult to detect and require special photographic equipment.

Long theorized with sporadic word-of-mouth observations, bright electrical bursts above thunderstorms were first documented in 1989 by ground-based observations and instruments on the space shuttle. Scientists know little about how the discharges are triggered or how they reach the atmosphere so high, near the edge of space.

Taranis, led by French space agency CNES, will attempt to untangle what triggers these brief flashes above thunderstorms and how TLEs could affect conditions within the atmosphere or in space.

The 175-pound (175-kilogram) Taranis satellite “will be able to detect these phenomena and record their light and radiation signatures with fine resolution, as well as the electromagnetic disturbances they generate in the upper layers of Earth’s atmosphere,” he said. the CNES in a press release.

Instruments aboard Taranis include cameras, X-ray and gamma-ray detectors, electron detectors, a magnetometer, and sensors to detect plasma and electric fields in space.

Taranis will also study Earth’s gamma-ray bursts, or TGFs, short bursts of gamma-ray photons observed to emanate from thunderstorms around the world.

“Taranis is the first space mission that combines optical, gamma, energetic particles and electrical and magnetic measurements to improve our understanding of these phenomena,” said Jean-Louis Pinçon, scientific director of the Taranis mission of CNRS, the national research center French scientific. “Eventually, once we fully understand the generation mechanisms, we will have the opportunity to estimate the real impacts of TLE and TGF on the physics and chemistry of the upper atmosphere.”

After launch, Taranis will deploy the instrument arms and begin several months of commissioning and validation. The scientific data is expected to be available from Taranis next June, Pinçon said in response to written questions from Spaceflight Now.

CNES has spent about 115 million euros, or $ 136 million, on the Taranis project since its inception in 2010. The mission is designed to run for two to four years, Pinçon said.

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