the spacecraft from Europe to the mission’s launch base in South America by ship instead of airplane. Engineers worried the pressure increase during an airplane’s descent would damage the instrument package on Aeolus.
There were no such concerns about a pressure decrease like the conditions the spacecraft encountered as it climbed into space.
Once the spacecraft arrived in French Guiana, teams fueled Aeolus and put the spacecraft through an extra step of cleaning. Technicians used a powerful ultraviolet torch to search for particles of dust residing on the satellite, then used a soft brush and vacuum cleaner to remove any contamination they found.
“This is a bit of a tedious task, but one that is necessary,” ESA said in a statement.
The Aeolus satellite was built by Airbus Defense and Space’s spacecraft manufacturing plant in Stevenage, England, and is based on the satellite design used by ESA’s Rosetta and Mars Express interplanetary probes. With its maneuvering fuel loaded, Aeolus weighed around 3,013 pounds (1,367 kilograms) at launch, according to Elfving.
Airbus Defense and Space’s division in Toulouse, France, developed the ALADIN instrument, and the laser transmitters were supplied by the Italian company Leonardo in Florence and Pomezia, Italy.
The launch was delayed an extra day from Tuesday to Wednesday to allow for more favorable high-altitude winds over the Guiana Space Center.
The early hours of Aeolus’s mission appeared to go according to plan. ESA officials said the satellite extended its power-generating solar panels on time, and the first three days of the mission will focus on activations of key spacecraft systems, putting the observatory into a stable configuration for testing.
“Then we start switching on the laser and the instrument,” Elfving said. “That will take around two weeks if it goes well, but it could take longer because there’s a lot of tuning and observing of this high-energy laser. We don’t want to damage anything if we have any wrong settings. In October, we expect to start collecting and calibrating data.”
Scientists will meticulously compare Aeolus’s data with wind measurements collected by airplanes. The calibration campaign will extend into next year, ensuring accuracy of the satellite’s measurements.
“That will go on until the second quarter of 2019, and by that moment, we hope to have declared the quality such that meteorologists … can start ingesting our data operationally,” Elfving said.
Aeolus is the fifth in a series of ESA’s Earth Explorer missions, a line of satellite projects designed to make measurements of a specific part of the Earth’s land, sea, or atmospheric environments, while making advancements in technology for future Earth observation missions.
“Aeolus epitomizes the essence of an Earth Explorer,” said Jan Woerner, ESA’s director general, in a statement. “It will fill a gap in our knowledge of how the planet functions and demonstrate how cutting-edge technology can be used in space.”
The next launch for Arianespace is scheduled for September, when the 100th flight of an Ariane 5 rocket is set to haul two commercial communications satellites into orbit. That mission will also mark the 300th launch managed by Arianespace since its formation.
The Vega rocket’s next flight is scheduled for no earlier than December, with the Italian Space Agency’s experimental PRISMA mission to test a new type of Earth-imaging camera in orbit.
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