An Ariane 5 rocket is set to blast off on its first flight since an upgraded version exploded after take-off in December 2002. The rocket is scheduled to lift off from Europe’s spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana, between 2249 GMT and 2330 GMT on Tuesday.
The standard Ariane 5 rocket will carry two satellites. The first, INSAT-3A, is a communications and meteorological research satellite built by the Indian Space Research Organisation. The second, Galaxy XII, is a telecommunications satellite owned by the US company PanAmSat.
A successful flight is crucial for the European space consortium Arianespace, which faces both a depressed satellite launch market and increasing competition from Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Arianespace also retired its smaller, but more reliable, Ariane 4 launcher in February 2003.
In December, the upgraded Ariane 5 ECA veered off course soon after launch and self-destructed. An inquiry into the failure blamed a component unique to the new heavy-lift rocket. A cooling system on the Vulcain 2 engine is thought to have sprung a leak during take-off, causing the rocket to become unstable.
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But the inquiry board also called for a programme-wide safety review and engineers have spent the last three months examining the standard launcher’s Vulcain 1 first stage engine to ensure that would not suffer a similar malfunction.
Grounding all Ariane 5 rockets delayed a number of satellite launches. In particular, it delivered a major setback to Rosetta, a comet-chasing mission devised by the European Space Agency. This mission had only a brief launch window in January 2003 and has now been set back until 2004.
The Ariane 5 ECA is first European rocket designed to carry 10 tonnes into geosynchronous transfer orbit. The next flight of this version of the Ariane 5 launcher is expected to carry a dummy cargo into orbit, rather than a multi-million dollar satellite payload.
