A European satellite hosting a spaceborne laser crafted to measure winds in Earth’s atmosphere rode a Vega launcher into orbit Wednesday from French Guiana, a thundering sendoff for a three-year mission that could improve global weather forecasts.
The 98-foot-tall (30-meter) Vega rocket, primarily built by Avio in Italy, lit its solid-fueled first stage motor at 2120:09 GMT (5:20:09 p.m. EDT; 6:20:09 p.m. French Guiana time) Wednesday and steered on a trajectory north away from the European-run spaceport on the northern coast of South America.
Flying for the 12th time, the four-stage Vega launcher reached supersonic speed in around 30 seconds, darting through a partly cloud sky shortly before sunset at the space base on the edge of the Amazon jungle.
Two more solid-fueled rocket motors fired in succession, then an upper stage engine fed by liquid propellants ignited twice to maneuver the European Space Agency’s Aeolus satellite into a polar orbit approximately 199 miles (320 kilometers) above Earth.
After flying halfway around the world, automated commands sent from the Vega rocket’s on-board computer released the Aeolus spacecraft around 55 minutes into the mission. Ground stations in Australia and Antarctica received the first signals from the satellite, and relayed the telemetry to the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany, where engineers confirmed Aeolus was in good shape following launch.
Arianespace, the French launch services provider in charge of Wednesday’s Vega flight, declared the launch successful, making the light-class launcher 12-for-12 since its debut in 2012.
“Arianespace is delighted to confirm that Aeolus has been safely separated in its targeted sun synchronous orbit. Congratulations to all,” said Stephane Israel, CEO of Arianespace. “Aeolus will precisely measure wind flow and air currents on the Earth, improving weather forecasting, and ultimately our ability to protect the environment. Aeolus demonstrates how assets in space can help to preserve our planet, and how Europe can contribute to this critical mission.”
Funded by the European Space Agency and built by Airbus Defense and Space, the 480 million euro ($550 million) Aeolus mission is nearly two decades in the making. Since receiving ESA’s formal go-ahead in 2002, Aeolus has suffered numerous delays as engineers encountered problems with the mission’s laser instrument.
Aeolus will gather the first comprehensive worldwide measurements of wind speed — over oceans and land masses — from Earth’s surface to an altitude of nearly 100,000 feet (30 kilometers).
Data collected by the Aeolus satellite will be fed into numerical weather prediction models, replacing simulated “boundary conditions” in the computers models with near real-time measurements from space.
“We are serving the meteorological community as the primary user, but also the climate research community,” said Anders Elfving, Aeolus project manager at ESA. “For decades, there has been an outcry from these communities for explicit wind measurements, explicit wind profiles in the whole atmosphere, globally and continuously.”
Aeolus was not conceived by ESA as an operational weather satellite, but forecasters will be some of the prime beneficiaries of the mission. The mission is named for a figure in Greek mythology who was appointed by the gods as “keeper of the winds,”
“We have a unique product which can be — if proven to the right quality — directly injected into the weather models,” Elfving said in a phone interview with Spaceflight Now before the launch. “Our main client is the ECMWF, the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasts … in the UK, and they will certainly inject our data straight into their model and get a lot of good boundary conditions for winds, which are today completely missing.”
Aeolus carries a high-power ultraviolet laser fired at 50 pulses per second toward the ground. Light emitted from the laser — the centerpiece of Aeolus’s single science instrument — will bounce off air molecules, aerosol and cloud particles, and Earth’s surface.
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