Global Benefits from ESA’s Ariane 5 Launching
On August 14th, the European Space Agency’s Ariane 5 ECA had its 5th launching from the European Spaceport at Kourou in French Guiana. Its mission was to provide 24 Ku-band channels of television and enterprise data distribution to the USA, the Gulf of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean–with a payload of 8068 kg.
Flight V185 lifted-off at 22:44 CEST/Paris in order to place two telecommunications satellites into geostationary transfer orbits, injected into the correct transfer orbit about half-an-hour after launch. Seven Ariane 5 missions have been targeted by Europe’s Spaceport and Arianspace for 2008. The Ariane 5 ECA is considered the latest version of the Ariane 5 launcher, designed to place payloads up to 9.6 tons into the geostationary transfer orbit, allowing it to handle dual launches of very large satellites.
Orbiting the earth the same speed as the earth turns, geostationary orbit is when the satellite also orbits at the same latitude—zero latitude of the equator–it appears to be hovering in a motionless manner over the same area. Actually, the satellite and the rotation of the earth is totally synchronized with the orbit tilted to the equator plane. Once the satellite is placed in geostationary orbits, it wanders up and down in the latitude while staying over the longitude line. Arthur C. Clarke is credited with developing the geostationary orbital concept, publishing
Others had earlier pointed out that bodies traveling a certain distance above the earth on the equatorial plane would remain motionless with respect to the earth’s surface. But Clarke published an article in 1945’s Wireless World that made the leap from the Germans’ rocket research to suggest permanent manmade satellites that could serve as communication relays.
Check out A Mars Odyssey’s articles at Reuters. YEAH!! We made the front page online!!
This entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 6:08 pm and is filed under Mars News, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
