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.
Europe’s MetOp-C weather satellite launched aboard a Russian-built Soyuz rocket toward polar orbit Tuesday night from French Guiana, joining an international fleet of meteorological observatories critical for global weather forecasting. Liftoff occurred at 7:47 p.m. EST Tuesday (0047 GMT Wednesday).
The European Space Agency’s $550 million Aeolus science mission, the product of a drawn-out 16-year development effort that required engineers to master new technologies, is in the starting blocks on a launch pad in French Guiana awaiting liftoff Wednesday to monitor wind speeds from space for the first time on a global scale.
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