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A new space tug, the second to extend the life of older satellites, was put into orbit on a European rocket on Saturday after weeks of delays due to weather conditions and rocket checks.
An Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket propelled the Mission Expansion Vehicle-2 (MEV-2) into space on Sunday July 31, putting the vehicle underway to an Intelsat satellite awaiting a boost in orbit more high. On the rocket, two satellites for broadband communications.
The launch took off from the Guyanese Space Center near Kourou, French Guiana at 7:04 p.m. local time (6:04 p.m. EDT or 10:04 p.m. GMT), marking the fifth launch of 2020 for Arianespace.
It has been a long road to launch. The mission was originally scheduled for July 28, but was delayed to allow “additional technical checks needed under the fairing and the Ariane dual launch system,” Arianespace said in a statement at the time. Bad weather prevented subsequent launch attempts added a few minutes of delay to today’s launch. (It was originally scheduled to take off 31 minutes earlier at 5:33 p.m. EDT or 9:33 p.m. GMT.)
Related: The launch of 53 Arianespace Vega rocket satellites postponed to August
MEV-2 will continue a series of satellite maintenance missions for Intelsat. The first mission, MEV-1, successfully docked to the Intelsat 901 satellite in February, marking a historic first for satellite work. The hope is that repairing and resupplying aging satellites will be a less expensive endeavor than launching replacement satellites into space.
With Intelsat 901 returning to full service in April, according to a statement from Intelsat, the company is now awaiting a second opportunity. The MEV-2 was developed by Northrop Grumman’s subsidiary, SpaceLogistics LLC, and the MEV-2 is expected to join and dock with the Intelsat 1002 / IS-1002 satellite, originally launched in 2004, in early 2021.
The spacecraft will use its own thrusters and fuel supply to control the orbit of the IS-1002 satellite, Arianespace said in a July 8 statement. MEV-2 will return the satellite to a geostationary orbit, where the orbital period of the satellite corresponds to the speed of rotation of the Earth. If all goes as planned, the MEV-2 will detach from the Intelsat satellite for a future mission.
On the Ariane 5 rocket were also two satellites designed for telecommunications services.
Arianespace also launched the Galaxy 30 satellite for Intelsat as part of a larger offering to replace the aging set of North American Galaxy satellites for broadcast services. Galaxy 30 and other satellites in its group will provide services such as ultra-high definition broadcasts, over-the-top service to allow consumers to broadcast directly from satellite, and a range of other services for the broadband, mobile and business.
The BSAT-4b satellite built by Maxar also traveled to space for the Japanese company Broadcasting Satellite System Corp. The satellite will be used for direct home services and will serve as a backup to another ultra-high definition satellite launched in 2017, called BSAT. -4a.
Arianespace marks its fifth flight of 2020 after temporarily suspending launches in French Guiana in March due to the novel coronavirus pandemic. Test flights for the rocket that will succeed the heavyweight Ariane 5, called Ariane 6, will be postponed to at least 2021 due to the pandemic, the European Space Agency announced this month.
“While we know that the inaugural flight will not take place until the second half of 2021, at this time we cannot precisely quantify the delay, and we cannot provide an exact launch date,” said Daniel Neuenschwander, director of space transport at ESA. a translation provided by the remarks agency during a July 9 press event covered by SpaceNews. ESA officials added that they hope to have more clarity on the launch date in a few months.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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