Monday night’s blastoff of a Vega rocket from the northern shore of South America dispatched a 2,500-pound Earth imaging satellite for Europe and put on a light show across the tropical spaceport at the edge of the Amazon.
The 98-foot-tall rocket launched at 10:51:58 p.m. local time Monday (0151:58 GMT Tuesday; 9:51:58 p.m. EDT Monday) from the Guiana Space Center. It released the camera-carrying Sentinel 2A environmental satellite into orbit nearly 500 miles above Earth about 55 minutes later.
The first of up to four Vega rocket launches planned this year lifted off Thursday night from French Guiana carrying the Italian PRISMA hyperspectral Earth-imaging satellite.
The solid-fueled launcher blasted off from the Guiana Space Center at 0150:35 GMT (9:50:35 p.m. EDT).
An Israeli-built moon lander aiming to become the first privately-funded mission reach another planetary body rocketed away from Cape Canaveral on Thursday night aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, riding piggyback with an Indonesian communications spacecraft and an experimental U.S. Air Force space surveillance microsatellite.
A mission to investigate the atmospheres of planets around other stars has been selected by the European Space Agency for launch in the late 2020s, officials announced this week.