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Credit: ESA Manuel Pedousaut
Note from the publisher: The start of the European Ariane 6 rocket with the CSO 3 mission was scrubbed on Monday morning shortly before 11 a.m. ET (1,600 GMT). A new start date and a new time was not announced by Arianespace.
Europe’s powerful new Ariane 6 rocket will fly for the second time today (March 3) and you can see the action live.
The Ariane 6 is said to be launching a French spy satellite from the European space in Kourou, French -Guayana, at 11:24 a.m. EST (1624 GMT; 1:24 p.m. local time in Kourou).
You can view the campaign here at Space.com or directly via the Arianespace based in France. The cover begins about 30 minutes before lifting.
Ariane 6, who runs Arianespace on behalf of the European Space Agency (ESA), is the successor to the workhorse Ariane 5which retired in 2023 after 117 orbital missions.
It took longer than expected to get the new rocket online. The development of the Ariane 6 started in 2014, but the Launcher only moved nine Cubesats to the orbit last July. However, the flight was not perfect; The upper level of the Ariane 6 could not complete an engine burning, which is intended to set up the use of two experimental return capsules.
The ESA started the second mission of Ariane 6 last year, but took a little more time to tackle the problems experienced on flight 1.
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Today’s start will send an optical spy satellite called CSO-3 for the French military. If everything is planned, CSO-3 is used in a solar synchronous orbit of around 800 kilometers above the earth.
Satellites in solar synchronous orbit run every day over the spots of the planet at the same local sunny time, which means that they look at these areas with constant lighting conditions over time. This type of orbit is therefore particularly popular with spy and weather satellites.
“CSO-3 is the third in a constellation of three military straw observation satellites for the DGA-guided music program (multinational space base image system),” said the French space agency CNES in a statement. (The DGA or towards Générale de l’Armement is the defense authority of the French government.)
The first two members of the network, CSO-1 and CSO-2, were launched in 2018 or 2020.
