A massive spacecraft bound for Mars lifted off on a Russian Proton rocket Monday, riding more than 2 million pounds of thrust from the launcher’s six main engines through low clouds hanging over the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
It will take more than 12 hours from liftoff of the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter until engineers verify the mission is on track for Mars after a series of critical in-space maneuvers by the Proton rocket’s Breeze M upper stage.
A powerful Russian Proton booster launched from Kazakhstan at 0931:42 GMT (5:31:42 a.m. EDT) Monday with the first part of a multibillion-dollar Mars mission led by the European Space Agency. An upper stage engine fired four times over 10 hours to send the Mars orbiter and lander away from Earth.
Humankind’s largest emissary to Mars in a generation is set for blastoff Monday, when Europe and Russia will dispatch a mission to unravel the mystery of Martian methane.
A Russian Proton rocket rolled out to its launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Friday, riding a specially-built rail car with Europe’s ExoMars mission bound for the red planet.
Europe’s ExoMars orbiter, due to begin a seven-month journey to the red planet March 14, has met its Russian Proton rocket booster as launch preparations enter the final stages at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
A Soviet-era missile originally built to deliver nuclear warheads to the United States in wartime fired into space for a much different purpose Tuesday, carrying a European environmental satellite into orbit to help track the effects of climate change.
Soaring into the night sky over a guarded Russian military base, a 1.2-ton European satellite rocketed into orbit Tuesday to regularly measure how the world’s oceans and ice sheets respond to climate change and drive global weather patterns.
A European environmental satellite launched Tuesday from Russia’s Plesetsk Cosmodrome to begin a mission of at least seven years measuring the height, color and temperature of the world’s oceans. The Sentinel 3A spacecraft lifted off aboard a Rockot booster at 1757 GMT (12:57 p.m. EST).
Russian rocket technicians fueled a decommissioned ballistic missile with propellants Monday, a day ahead of the launch of a European satellite primed to observe the planet’s oceans.