Vega was added to the Arianespace family in 2012, designed for flights with small- to medium-sized satellite payloads. Wednesday’s launch mirrored the usual launch configuration of her big sister, Ariane 5, which is designed for large satellites on missions to geostationary transfer orbit, and low-Earth orbits with very heavy payloads.
The mission lasted 97 minutes, delivering the Optsat-3000 and Venμs into their planned orbits, reports Phys.Org. The Optsat 3000, the first of the two satellites to be deployed, is an Earth observation satellite for the Italian Ministry of Defense and was built by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI). Optsat 3000 has a designed life of over seven years and weighs in at 368 kilograms (811 pounds).
The second satellite, Venμs – Vegetation and Environment monitoring on a New Micro Satellite – is sponsored by France and Israel, and will be used to study vegetation and the environment during its science mission, while the satellite’s technical mission will involve demonstrating a new Israeli electrical propulsion system based on Hall-Effect thrusters.
Venμs weighs 264 kilograms (582 pounds) but packs a multispectral camera that can capture details not visible to the human eye. The camera operates in 12 wavelengths that work simultaneously, taking 12 images all at once from the same location, with each in different spectral bands, including those in the near-infrared range. Now, how cool is that?
Venμs’s flight path is a Sun-synchronous, near-polar orbit that allows it to return to the same area around the world, exactly at the same time and under the same imagery conditions on each of its orbits. The satellite’s electric propulsion system allows for reducing the mass of hydrazine chemical propellant used during flexible orbital maneuvers that can be affected online, extending the lifetime considerably.
Flight VV10 was Arianespace’s eighth mission of 2017. It followed the launches of four Ariane 5s, two Soyuz vehicles and one Vega so far this year.
