PARIS: Europe resumed its beleaguered Galileo satnav programme on Friday, launching a pair of satellites seven months after a rocket malfunction sent two multi-million euro orbiters awry.
Galileo’s seventh and eighth satellites blasted off from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, at 2146 GMT (6:46pm local time), to join four orbiters already in the constellation.
A live broadcast on the European Space Agency (ESA) website showed the pair taken aloft aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket – the same type that malfunctioned last August.
Galileo will be a rival to the US GPS and Russia’s Glonass satellite navigation systems, but unlike them will be under civilian control.
Friday’s launch is a crucial next step for a programme that has been plagued by technical problems, delays and budget questions.
The multi-billion-euro satellite navigation and search and rescue system will ultimately consist of 30 orbiters, and is set to become fully operational by 2020.
Friday’s launch had been scheduled for December last year, but was suspended pending a probe into the Aug 22 mis-launch which sent satellites five and six into an incorrect orbit.
They should have been slotted into a circular trajectory at an altitude of 23,500 kilometres, inclined at 56° to the equator. Instead, they were placed in an elliptical orbit that saw them travelling as high as 25,900 km above Earth and to a low point of 13,713 km, not useful for navigation.
Both have since been manoeuvred into a better, more circular path, but it is still not clear whether they will ultimately form a useful part of the satnav programme.
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