An Ariane 5 rocket fired off a launch pad in French Guiana Tuesday with nearly 3 million pounds of thundering thrust, heading to orbit with India’s heaviest satellite designed to expand broadband coverage across the South Asian nation, and a South Korean weather satellite carrying an U.S.-built imager to track storms and cyclones across the Asia-Pacific.
A powerful European Ariane 5 rocket blasted off from French Guiana late Friday and boosted a pair of satellites into space for a seven-year plunge into the inner solar system, a voyage requiring seven planetary flybys to slow down enough in the sun’s gravitational clutches to slip into orbit around hellish Mercury.
An Ariane 5 rocket emerged from the final assembly building at the Guiana Space Center in South America on Monday for the journey across the tropical spaceport to the ELA-3 launch zone, where the 179-foot-tall (54.8-meter) booster will lift off Tuesday with a pair of commercial communications satellites.
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