An Ariane 5 successfully launched a European spacecraft on an eight-year journey to Jupiter April 14 on the penultimate flight of the venerable rocket. The Ariane 5 lifted off from the European spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana, at 8:14 a.m. Eastern after weather scrubbed a launch attempt the previous day. The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or JUICE, spacecraft separated from the Ariane upper stage 26 minutes after liftoff. Controllers made contract with JUICE about 40 minutes after liftoff and, a half-hour later, deployed its two large solar arrays with a total area of 85 square meters that will generate power for the six-ton spacecraft. The acquisition of signals from JUICE took place a little later than expected, although still within the nominal window for doing so. Solar array deployment took place a little earlier than expected. Jean-Marc Nasr, head of space systems at Airbus Defence and Space, explained at a post-launch briefing that the array deployment took place earlier because the sun acquisition by spacecraft systems was precise. “It is a sign of a perfect mission,” he said. The launch starts an eight-year journey for JUICE to reach Jupiter and three of its largest moons. The Airbus-built spacecraft will perform several gravity-assist flybys to reach Jupiter, starting with a joint flyby of the Earth and the moon in August 2024. Additional Earth flybys are scheduled for September 2026 and January 2029, along with a Venus flyby in August 2025. JUICE will enter orbit around Jupiter in July 2031, performing 35 flybys of Europa, Ganymede and Callisto to characterize their surfaces and subterranean oceans, including determining if they are habitable. JUICE will go into orbit around Ganymede in December 2034 through the end of its mission, currently planned for September 2035.
An Ariane 5 lifts off April 14 carrying ESA's JUICE mission to Jupiter.
Credit: ESA/M.Pédoussaut
“I think this is something that Europe can be extremely proud of,” Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA, said at the post-launch briefing. “This is a mission that is answering questions of science that are burning to all of us.”
JUICE, with an estimated total cost of 1.5 billion euros ($1.65 billion), will attempt to answer those questions with a suite of 10 instruments, one of which was contributed by NASA. The Japanese space agency JAXA and Israel Space Agency are also partners on the mission, contributing parts of other instruments.
The launch was the sixth Ariane 5 flight to carry ESA missions, a total that includes the December 2021 launch of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope that features significant ESA contributions. It was the 116th Ariane 5 launch overall, dating back to 1996.
Only one more Ariane 5 flight remains, a launch tentatively scheduled in late June of two European government communications satellites, France’s Syracuse 4B and Germany’s Heinrich Hertz.
“I think it’s a wonderful symbol to have made this one with ESA and the very last for Germany and France,” Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, said at the post-launch briefing.
The Ariane 5 is being replaced by the Ariane 6, whose first flight has been delayed by several years. The most recent date announced by ESA for the inaugural Ariane 6 flight is late 2023, amid speculation it could slip again into 2024.
Aschbacher did not give a new estimate for the debut of the Ariane 6. “We are working very hard and doing everything to get it on the launch pad as quick as we can,” he said. “We have to go through some decisive milestones in the next couple of weeks, but certainly we are on a good track.”
“I feel a bit sad that this wonderful rocket is going out of service,” he said of the Ariane 5, but added that Ariane 6 “will be an equally good launcher.”
China’s Long March 2D booster launched into space on Tuesday, January 9, at 11:24 a.m. Beijing time (10:24 p.m. EST and 03:24 GMT on Jan. 8) sending a duo of SuperView-1 satellites into orbit. The mission, which opens Beijing’s busy 2018 launch manifest, lifted off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center (TSLC) located in China’s Shanxi Province. Following a usual pattern for Chinese launches, in particular for those employing the Long March 2D booster, Beijing remained tight-lipped about the details of the mission, its timeline and pre-launch activities. The preparations for the launch commenced in November as the liftoff was originally scheduled for December 25. After liftoff, the rocket began a short vertical climb before turning south across mainland China, toward the South China Sea. During the initial phase of the flight, the rocket was powered by the main stage’s YF-21C engine delivering some 2,962 kilonewtons of thrust. This stage was detached about three minutes after liftoff. Afterward, the second stage’s YF-24C cluster engine was ignited, marking the start of a seven-minute ride to orbit. This phase most likely concluded approximately 10 minutes after liftoff when the satellites were deployed into space. Mission success was declared by the state-run Xinhua press agency, when both SuperView-1 spacecraft were inserted into a Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO) at an altitude of about 310 miles (500 kilometers).
SuperView-1 03 and SuperView-1 04 (also known as GaoJing-1 03 and GaoJing-1 04), are the final two of four satellites of the first generation of the SuperView constellation. They are identical spacecraft, built by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST). The satellites are based on the CAST3000B platform and are fitted with two deployable solar arrays.
If everything goes as it is currently planned, the pair of newest SuperView-1 spacecraft will be operated by the Beijing Space View Technology Co., Ltd. They will provide imagery with 1.64-foot (0.5-meter) panchromatic resolution and 6.56-foot (2-meter) multispectral (blue, green, red, near-infrared) resolution.
The first pair of SuperView-1 satellites were launched on December 28, 2016, however some problems occurred during the separation of the duo from a Long March 2D booster, that resulted in the spacecraft being placed into a lower-than-intended orbit. The issue was finally corrected in mid-January of 2017.
“The two satellites are working at the normal orbit now. The ground stations have successfully received 1,241 scenes of imagery by January 11, 2017,” Beijing Space View Technology reported in January 2017.
The plan for the SuperView-1 quartet is to have the four satellites phased 90 degrees from each other on the same orbit to collect imagery for clients worldwide. The satellites are designed to work in multiple collection modes including long strip, multiple strips collect, multiple-point targets collect, and stereo imaging. They are expected to deliver highly-detailed imagery for precise map creation, change detection, and in-depth image analysis.
The SuperView-1 spacecraft feature a data collection capability of two terabytes of storage on board and, if in the proper orbit, are able to obtain images covering 270,300 square miles (700,000 square kilometers) across the globe per day.
“The satellites will provide services in a number of fields from environmental monitoring to disaster mitigation,” said Xu Wen, general manager of China Siwei Surveying and Mapping Technology Co. Ltd, a company which controls Beijing Space View Technology.
The full SuperView constellation should consist of 24 Earth-observing satellites that is slated to be orbited by 2022. China hopes that the network will become one of the world’s largest commercial providers of space imagery and geospatial data.
The Long March 2D launcher that has been selected for Tuesday’s flight is a two-stage rocket developed by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology. It is mainly used to launch satellites into low-Earth orbit (LEO). The 135 foot (41.15 meters) tall booster can launch payloads of up to 3.5 metric tons to LEO and has an SSO capability of up to 1.3 metric tons. The rocket was launched for the first time on Aug. 9, 1992, from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, orbiting the Fanhui Shei Weixing FSW-2-1 recoverable satellite.
Tuesday’s launch was the 261st flight of the Long March rocket series. The next Chinese mission is currently scheduled to take place on January 11, when a Long March 3C will take to skies with two BeiDou-3 navigation satellites.
Overall, China plans to conduct about 35-40 launches in 2018, including the Chang’e 4 lander – the first spacecraft to attempt a soft landing on the far side of the Moon. The country is also working toward the debut of its new light-lift launcher, Kuaizhou-11, and plans to perform the first orbital launch from a sea platform as well.
India will launch 31 satellites, including the earth observation spacecraft Cartosat on January 10, from its spaceport at Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh, an official said on Saturday. "We have tentatively scheduled the rocket launch at 9.30 a.m. to carry Cartosat and other satellites, including 28 from the US and five other countries in a single mission," Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Director Devi Prasad Karnik told IANS here. The first space mission in 2018 onboard the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C40) comes four months after a similar rocket failed to deliver the country's eighth navigation satellite in the earth's lower orbit on August 31. "The sixth Cartosat in the second series and other satellites are integrated with the rocket at the spaceport. The mission launch board will decide the rocket's lift-off time for the reverse countdown two days ahead," said Karnik. The mission's payload will also include one each nano and micro satellite from India, besides Cartosat-2.
As an observational satellite, Cartosat will beam high-quality images for cartographic, urban and rural applications, coastal land use and regulation and utility management like road network monitoring.
The previous two satellites in the Cartosat-2 series were launched on June 23 and February 15, from the spaceport on the east coast, about 90km up Chennai.
As a follow-on mission, Cartosat will also relay high resolution scene specific spot imageries with data from its panchromatic and multi-spectral cameras operating in time delay integration mode.
The space scientists are taking special measures to ensure the 44.4 metre rocket will sling the 720kg Cartosat and other satellites one-after-one into their intended orbits.
"The August 31 mission suffered a setback when the 320-tonne workhorse launcher (PSLV-C39) did not separate the heat shield to deliver the spare satellite in the Indian Remote Navigation Satellite Series (IRNSS-H) from its cone-shaped top-end," recalled another official.
To make up for the lost time when launches were held up for four months pending inquiry into the August 31 mission failure, the space agency plans to have at least one launch a month in 2018.
"We have lined up five-six launches in the first half of next year, including two for deploying GSAT-6A and GSAT-29 advanced communication satellites in the geo-synchronous orbit (36,000km above earth)," asserted the official.
The space agency will also launch its second lunar mission (Chandrayaan-2) to the moon, with an orbiter, lander and rover for the first time.
The 3,290 kg Chandrayaan-2 will orbit around the moon and study its lunar conditions to collect data on its topography, mineralogy, exosphere and the "presence" of water ice and hydroxyl. On reaching the 100 km lunar orbit, the lander with the six-wheeled rover will separate from the spacecraft and descend slowly to soft land on the lunar surface at a designated spot.
"The rover will move around the landing site in semi-autonomous mode as per the ground commands while its instruments will observe the lunar surface and transmit the data for analysis of its soil," added the official.
