An Ariane 5 rocket will make its fourth flight of the year Wednesday, hauling two communications satellites into orbit for Inmarsat, Hellas-Sat and India’s space agency.
The nearly 180-foot-tall (55-meter) launcher will blast off from Kourou, French Guiana, at 2059 GMT (4:59 p.m. EDT; 5:59 p.m. French Guiana time) with the Hellas-Sat 3/Inmarsat S EAN and GSAT 17 communications satellites.
Made in France by Thales Alenia Space and in India by the Indian Space Research Organization, respectively, Hellas-Sat 3/Inmarsat S EAN and GSAT 17 will ride aboard the Ariane 5 in a dual-payload stack. The larger of the two satellites, Hellas-Sat 3/Inmarsat S EAN, will deploy first, followed by separation of GSAT 17 around 42 minutes after liftoff.
The rocket will target an orbit ranging from 155 miles (250 kilometers) to 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers), with a tilt of 3 degrees to the equator.
Date source: Arianespace
T-0:00:00: Vulcain 2 ignition
T+0:00:07: Solid rocket booster ignition and liftoff
Sixty more satellites for SpaceX’s Starlink global Internet network streaked into orbit Monday night from Cape Canaveral, including one spacecraft to test an experimental dark coating to address scientists’ concerns that the thousands of the quarter-ton, flat-panel satellites will impede astronomical observations.
SpaceX and United Launch Alliance expect to resume launches with little or no delay after Hurricane Irma veered west of Cape Canaveral last weekend, sparing the launch base from the storm’s most extreme damage.
An Ariane 5 rocket will fire into the sky from French Guiana just after sunset Wednesday and deliver nearly 12 tons of payload to an orbit reaching 22,000 miles up less than a half-hour later.