European Space Agency launches rocket with Ukrainian engine
A Vega rocket successfully lifted off from the equatorial Kourou spaceport in French Guiana.
The launch was broadcast on the website of the French company Arianespace.
As President Petro Poroshenko announced on Facebook, one of the stages of the rocket engine was produced by the Ukrainian PA Yuzhny Machine-Building Plant named after A.M. Makarov.
“The RD-843 of the fourth stage of the rocket was developed by the state enterprise Yuzhnoye Design Office and manufactured by the state enterprise PA Yuzhny Machine-Building Plant named after A.M. Makarov,” he wrote.
The president pointed out that this is already the ninth launch in the context of the Vega program, and the first in 2017.
Aboard the rocket is the Sentinel-2B satellite from the global environment monitoring and safety project “Copernicus”. Sentinel 2B is the fourth satellite in the Copernicus project. The first, Sentinel 1A, was placed in orbit in April 2014 with a Soyuz rocket. The satellites work in tandem at opposite points of the orbit in order to provide maximum coverage.
Since the start of the year, this is the third launch from the Kourou spaceport and the first using a Vega rocket. To this day, this type of rocket has been used eight times, for the first time in 2012.
The Sentinel program of the European Space Agency includes five families of satellites: Sentinel-1 is intended to receive comprehensive radiolocation data from the ERS and Envisat satellites. Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 monitor the land and oceans, and Sentinel-4 and Sentinel-5 are designed for meteorological and climate research, based on the study of the composition of the atmosphere.