The second Sentinel-1 satellite, called Sentinel-1B was launched on April 25 2016 to provide more ‘radar vision’ for Europe’s environmental Copernicus programme. The launch has been done on a Soyuz rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, at 21:02 GMT (23:02 CEST), separating from the rocket’s Fregat upper stage 23 min 35 sec later.
Sentinel-1B joins its identical twin, Sentinel-1A, in orbit to deliver information for numerous services, from monitoring ice in polar seas to tracking land subsidence, and for responding to disasters such as floods.
Credit image: +European Space Agency, ESA
ESA’s Director General Jan Woerner announed that “the launch of Sentinel-1B marks another important milestone as this is the first constellation we have realised for Copernicus,” Both satellites carry an advanced radar that images Earth’s surface through cloud and rain regardless of whether it is day or night.
Credit image: +European Space Agency, ESA
During the launch, the satellite’s 12 m-long radar antenna and two 10 m-long solar wings were folded up to fit into the Soyuz rocket’s protective fairing. The solar wings and radar open together in a careful sequence that will take about 10 hours to complete.
Now that Sentinel-1B has been placed safely in orbit, the team of controllers at ESA’s operations centre in Germany will ensure that everything is working correctly and commission the satellite for operations.
Volker Liebig, ESA’s Director of Earth Observation Programmes, said, “We have seen some marvellous results from Sentinel-1A. Only two weeks ago, for example, it captured images of large icebergs breaking away from Antarctica’s Nansen ice shelf
In the other hand, three CubeSats took advantage of this space launch. These small satellites, each measuring just 10×10×11 cm, were developed by teams of university students through the ‘Fly Your Satellite!’ programme, run by ESA’s Education & Knowledge Management Office in close collaboration with European universities. The three CubeSats are: OUFTI-1 from the University of Liege, Belgium, e-st@r-II from the Polytechnic of Turin, Italy, and AAUSat-4 from Aalborg University, Denmark.
“Importantly, the programme is helping to educate the next generation of scientists and engineers by transferring ESA knowhow in designing, building, testing, launching and operating satellites,” said Piero Galeone, ESA’s Head of the Tertiary Education Unit. “This way we are helping to shape the space workforce of the future by enabling students to experience the full lifecycle of a real space project according to ESA’s standards.”
Credit image: +European Space Agency, ESA
The other satellite that piggybacked a ride today is Microscope from the French space agency, CNES. MicroSCOPE (Micro-Satellite à traînée Compensée pour l'Observation du Principe d'Equivalence) is an approved CNES/ESA gravity-research minisatellite mission, put forward in 2000 by ONERA (Office National d'Etudes et de Recherches Aérospatiales), Châtillon, France, and by OCA (Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur) in Grasse, France. The mission is a collaboration between CNES, ZARM laboratory (University of Bremen), PTB (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt) of Braunschweig, Germany, OCA and ONERA.
The objective is to conduct a fundamental physics experiment, namely to test the general theory of relativity.
Credit image: +CNES
More details about this scientific space satellite will be published in the coming days, so stay tuned.
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