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French spy satellite launched
A EUROPEAN rocket roared into space from a pad in South America today, placing into orbit a surveillance satellite billed as giving France's military new abilities to spy worldwide. The unmanned craft lifted off smoothly from a launch centre in Kourou, French Guyana, at 1.36pm (3.26am AEDT Sunday) - the third and last launch of an Ariane-5 rocket this year, Arianespace said. The satellite and six smaller scientific ones were placed into orbit about an hour after liftoff. It was the first time in 11 years that an Ariane rocket carried as many as seven satellites on a single launch.The Helios 2A military satellite, the rocket's main cargo, is to rotate in sun-synchronous orbit about 700km above the Earth, officials said. Among expected functions, the satellite is to monitor possible weapons proliferation, prepare and evaluate military operations and digitally map terrain for cruise-missile guidance, the French defence ministry said in a statement yesterday. Helios 2A, weighing 4.2 metric tons, is said to be able to spot objects as small as a textbook anywhere on Earth. Equipped with infrared sensors, it is expected to allow France's military to gather information at night from space for the first time. The optical satellite, while able to read heat signals emanating from Earth, will not be able to see through clouds - unlike satellites with radar technology. Helios 2A is part of a 10-year, 1.8 billion ($3.2 billion) program backed by Belgium and Spain. Such satellites are expected to last at least five years. Among its predecessors, Helios 1B, which was launched in 1999, suffered a power problem and the military let it disintegrate in the upper layers of the atmosphere two months ago. The first satellite in the series, Helios 1A, went up in 1995 and is still operating. Also in the payload today was the Parasol satellite, which is to help study the effect of cloud cover and aerosols on global warming and the greenhouse effect, believed to occur when carbon dioxide emissions trap the sun's heat in the atmosphere. Parasol is part of a French-American space observation mission involving six satellites that can study the world's atmosphere and help give a complete idea of how human activity affects the environment. The launch marks the 165th Ariane mission since the European launcher first began operating in 1979. Arianespace is the commercial arm of the 13-country European Space Agency. Arianespace plans next month to launch a souped-up version of Ariane-5 that is capable of carrying a 10-tonne payload - about 3 tonnes more than the previous version. The new version has been grounded since the failure of a launch attempt two years ago, when it veered off course and was destroyed by ground control - leading to the loss of two costly satellites. Posted by: God Save The World 2004-12-19 |
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