The Italian PRISMA Earth observation satellite is set to ride a Vega launcher into a 382-mile-high (615-kilometer) orbit Thursday night from French Guiana on a mission that will take less than one hour from liftoff until spacecraft separation.
Liftoff is scheduled for March 21 at 9:50:35 p.m. EDT (0150:35 GMT on March 22) from the Vega launch pad at the Guiana Space Center, located on the northeastern coast of South America. The Vega launcher, primarily developed and built in Italy, will head north over the Atlantic Ocean to deliver the PRISMA imaging satellite into a sun-synchronous orbit flying from pole-to-pole.
It will be the 14th flight of a Vega rocket, and the first Vega mission of 2019.
Take a walk around the Ariane 5 launch pad in French Guiana after the 16-story rocket arrived at the complex for liftoff Thursday with four European Galileo navigation satellites.
SpaceX’s next two missions will revert to launching older versions of the company’s Starlink internet satellites, instead of new second-generation Starlink platforms as originally planned, while ground teams work out unspecified problems with the first batch of upgraded Starlinks launched in February.
Two launches of Chinese rockets Friday and Sunday successfully placed Earth-imaging and technology demonstration satellites into orbit. The two missions, which took off from different spaceports, flew board Long March 11 and Long March 2D rockets.