Ariane 5 flight VA261: weather delays launch
Europe’s Ariane 5 rocket is being prepared for its final launch, following the replacement of pyrotechnical transmission lines which delayed its earlier scheduled liftoff. Due to unfavourable weather Flight VA261 will now lift off no earlier than 5 July at 23:00 BST/00:00 CEST, pending suitable conditions for launch. You can follow live on ESA Web TV; transmission starts 30 minutes before earliest liftoff time.
Flight VA261 will carry to space two payloads – the German space agency DLR’s experimental communications satellite Heinrich Hertz and the French communications satellite Syracuse 4b.
The flight will be the 117th mission for Ariane 5, a series which began in 1996. Notable Ariane 5 payloads have included ESA’s comet-chasing Rosetta, a dozen of Europe’s Galileo navigation satellites – orbited with just three launches – and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Ariane 5’s next-to-last launch sent ESA’s Juice mission to Jupiter.
This heavy launcher more than doubled the mass-to-orbit capacity of its predecessor, Ariane 4, which flew from 1988 until 2003 as a favourite of the telecommunications industry with its need to put large payloads into very high geosynchronous orbits. Ariane 5’s capacity enables it to orbit two large telecommunications satellites on a single launch, or to push large and heavy payloads into deep space.
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