The launch of a European climate-monitoring satellite has been delayed for “several weeks” pending technical checks on its Soyuz-2 launcher, a European space official said on Thursday.
Livia Briese, a spokesperson for the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, said the satellite would “return to its hangar” after technical problems scuppered plans for a launch this week.
“MetOp cannot be launched tonight, nor tomorrow. A new launch date has not yet been fixed but we hope to be able to launch the satellite in the near future,” said Alain Fournier-Sicre, head of the European Space Agency (ESA) in Russia. “The launcher’s booster engines must be checked again.”
The satellite, MetOp-A, was to have been put in orbit on Monday from Russia’s Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard a Soyuz-ST Fregat rocket, but the operation was postponed several times due to technical problems.
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Finer detail
The project’s backers, which include ESA, say this and two more satellites to be launched in coming years will provide higher quality data to improve weather forecasting and climate monitoring. The three satellites cost 2.4 billion ($3 billion) and are designed to work in conjunction with weather satellites operated by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The four-tonne MetOp-A satellite is the most complex of its kind, carrying around a dozen instruments for measuring weather patterns and transmitting data.
It is set to be Europe’s first polar-orbiting weather satellite. Unlike geostationary satellites, which hang 36,000 kilometres above a fixed point on the equator, polar-orbiting satellites circle the Earth at an altitude of about 800km.
Their lower altitude allows them to observe the Earth in finer detail than geostationary satellites, and their global view makes them better at producing long-term weather forecasts. Geostationary satellites are better at tracking severe storms on a minute-by-minute basis.
