CERN-tested optical fibres now on the International Space Station

 

CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research logo.

August 24, 2021

Astronaut Thomas Pesquet has activated Lumina, an optical fibre-based dosimetry experiment on board the International Space Station

Image above: Lumina is an optical fibre-based dosimetry experiment developed by CNES, iXBlue, UJM and CERN (Image credit: iXblue/CNES/G. Le Bras).

In a spacecraft, in order to protect both crew and electronics from radiation, it is mandatory to invest in effective radiation monitoring systems. The International Space Station (ISS), just like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, is a complex radiation environment that requires bespoke dosimetry devices. Optical-fibre-based technologies can provide both distributed and point radiation dose measurements with high precision.

On 18 August, ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet activated the Lumina experiment inside the ISS as part of the ALPHA mission. Developed under the coordination of the French Space Agency, CNES, and with the involvement of CERN, the Laboratoire Hubert Curien at the Université Jean-Monnet-Saint-Étienne, and iXblue, this project uses two several-kilometre-long optical fibres as active dosimeters to measure ionising radiation in the ISS with very high sensitivity.

Image above: ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet installing the Lumina experiment inside the Colombus science laboratory of the International Space Station (Image credit: CNES).

Daniel Ricci, leader of the Fibre Optics section of the Engineering department at CERN, explains: “When exposed to the space radiative environment, the optical fibres experience a partial loss of transmitted power, which we call radiation-induced attenuation.” Diego Di Francesca, fibre-dosimetry project leader in the team, describes in detail how the dosimeter works: “Using a reference control channel, the radiation-induced attenuation of some special optical fibres can be accurately measured and put in relation with the total ionising dose. The sensitivity of the device is mostly governed by the length of the fibre. Depending on the dosimeter design, the longer the optical fibre dosimeter, the more sensitive it is.”

In order to prevent radiation-induced damage to the electronics inside the accelerators, CERN has been working with radiation sensors based on optical fibres for six years. Building on this experience, CERN has made a technical contribution to Lumina by helping with the theoretical analysis of the optimised architecture of the dosimeters and by carrying out the low- and high-dose irradiation tests needed to calibrate the instrument. Once the experiment is fully installed by Thomas Pesquet, CERN will also contribute to the analysis of the experiment’s ground and flight data during its one to five years of operation.

Image above: Calibration tests of the Lumina dosimeter in the irradiation facilities at CERN (Image: CERN).

“A challenge of Lumina is to be sensitive enough to measure low radiation rate variations, considering the shielding provided by the ISS shell. The calibration performed at CERN, on a ground reference model, will enable us to post-process the measurements and will lead to accurate results,” explains Florence Clément, project manager of the Lumina experiment at CNES/CADMOS. “We are convinced that the ISS is only a first step for fibre-optic dosimeters as we venture further into space. As we move away from Earth, the radiation levels increase, and so does the need for reliable dose monitoring.”

By contributing to this experiment, CERN continues to demonstrate its added value for the space sector. “This joint experience in space is an important result of the framework collaboration agreement established between CERN and CNES a few years ago, with special focus on radiation issues,” highlights Enrico Chesta, Aerospace Applications Coordinator in CERN’s Knowledge Transfer group. “To monitor radiation damage to electronics, CERN has developed instruments that can also be used on satellites. In the field of irradiation testing, our unique technical facilities are able to reproduce a variety of environments representative of the most extreme radiation space conditions.”

Find out more about CERN’s impact on aerospace: https://kt.cern/aerospace

Note:

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. At CERN, the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments are used to study the basic constituents of matter — the fundamental particles. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature.

The instruments used at CERN are particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions.

Founded in 1954, the CERN Laboratory sits astride the Franco–Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe’s first joint ventures and now has 23 Member States.

Related links:

ALPHA mission: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/Alpha

CERN Engineering department: https://home.cern/about/who-we-are/our-governance

For more information about European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Visit: https://home.cern/

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: CERN/By Antoine Le Gall.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

NASA Tests Ways to Reduce Stress in Plants Growing in Space

 

ISS - Veggie Mission patch.

Aug 24, 2021

When astronauts embark on long-duration missions in the future, crews will grow food to supplement what they can bring with them. More than 20 years of continuously living and working in space aboard the International Space Station has provided many opportunities for crews and researchers to observe the challenges of growing plants in the stressful conditions of microgravity.

One experiment on NASA SpaceX’s 23rd Commercial Resupply Services mission to the space station will help determine the effect of plant stress responses to the microgravity environment. The Advanced Plant Experiment-08 (APEX-08) will grow Arabidopsis thaliana, a plant scientists routinely use for research. The study includes making genetic alterations that elicit a response in the pool of polyamines, a group of organic compounds that modulate plant responses to environmental stress.

Image above: The Science Verification Test for NASA’s Advanced Plant Experiment-08 (APEX-08) testing Arabidopsis thaliana, a plant scientists routinely use for research, takes place inside the Veggie growth chamber at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Nov. 6, 2020. The test is part of the process for demonstrating readiness for space research ahead of its flight on SpaceX’s 23rd Commercial Resupply Services mission to the International Space Station. The APEX-08 study includes making genetic alterations that elicit a response in a group of organic compounds that modulate plant responses to environmental stress. Image Credits: NASA/Lucy Orozco.

“This experiment will test a range of genotypes of Arabidopsis plants for modified abilities to respond to the microgravity environment," said Dr. Patrick Masson, principal investigator, University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We altered a polyamine metabolic pathway previously implicated in plant stress responses, and we’ll look for variations in growth and alterations in gene expression profiles between genotypes.”

Pools of polyamines in plants, particularly a major group called putrescines, could be manipulated in space and on the ground to reduce stress reactions. Masson, along with co-investigator Dr. Shih-Heng Su, selected six distinct genotypes of Arabidopsis plants for the study.

“The lines used in the APEX-08 experiment were modified to affect the ability of the plants to either synthesize or degrade putrescine,” said Su, associate scientist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “By regulating the expression level of certain genes, we can change the putrescine within the plants, which may change the ability of plants to respond differently to stress.”

Inside a laboratory at Kennedy’s Space Station Processing Facility (SSPF), the payload development team, including NASA researchers, the principal investigators, and contractors, placed the Arabidopsis seeds in an agar medium on Petri plates for the journey to the orbiting laboratory.

Upon delivery to the space station, crewmembers will install the plates in the Veggie plant growth facility and activate them by exposing them to Veggie LED lights, which will help them germinate. Crew members will photograph the seedlings at the end of the growth period for biometric analysis.

At the end of nine days, the plants will be harvested and preserved with a chemical fixative before they are placed in cold stowage for their return journey to Earth. The plants will be delivered to the investigators for gene-expression analysis.

Inside the SSPF, a team will initiate a ground control experiment that mimics space station conditions about 52 hours after astronauts initiate the experiment on the station.

Image above: The Science Verification Test for NASA’s Advanced Plant Experiment-08 (APEX-08) takes place inside the Veggie growth chamber at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Nov. 6, 2020. Image Credits: NASA/Lucy Orozco.

“By comparing the samples from the space station with the ground experiment results, we should have a good idea of how altering the pool of putrescine and derived compounds within the seedlings can potentially affect plant responses to the stress encountered in microgravity,” Masson said.

The results of the experiment will be sent to NASA’s GeneLab database for other researchers to use and compare with their studies.

As NASA project manager for APEX-08, Lucy Orozco coordinated the APEX-08 activities including scheduling, pre-flight tests, and operation support to ensure the mission success.

“It’s important to understand the fundamental biological factors that affect plants and how they grow in microgravity,” Orozco said. “By identifying effective solutions for sustainable plant growth, NASA will be able to support human deep space exploration from the Moon to Mars and beyond.”

For more information about space station research, visit https://nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research.

Related links:

Commercial Resupply Services: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/launch/spacex.html

Advanced Plant Experiment-08 (APEX-08): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/explorer/Investigation.html?#id=8300

Veggie: https://www.nasa.gov/content/growing-plants-in-space

GeneLab: https://genelab.nasa.gov/

Space Station Research and Technology: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/overview.html

International Space Station (ISS): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Linda Herridge.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

A very massive cluster of galaxies in the Spectr-RG survey

 

ROSCOSMOS & DLR - Spectrum-RG Mission patch.

August 24, 2021

In the sky survey of the eROSITA telescope aboard the Russian space observatory Spektr-RG, an X-ray observation of the very massive cluster of galaxies SRGe CL2305.2-2248 was carried out for the first time. A further observational campaign using the BTA and RTT-150 telescopes helped to clarify the distance to the cluster and to study the galaxies included in it. The article with the research results was published on the arxiv.org electronic preprint site and accepted for publication in Letters to the Astronomical Journal.

Clusters of galaxies are the most massive gravitationally bound objects in the universe. They represent a thickening of dark matter, filled with galaxies and hot intergalactic gas, visible in the X-ray range, as well as a distortion of the spectrum of the relict radiation (the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect). The total masses of galaxy clusters can reach 10¹⁵ solar masses and more. More massive objects have not yet formed during the lifetime of the universe.

Image above: Images of the SRGe CL2305.2-2248 galaxy cluster obtained with the SRG / eROSITA telescopes (left) and PTT-150 (right, artificial colors).

The SRGe cluster CL2305.2-2248 was first discovered in the millimeter range of electromagnetic radiation by observing the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect in the surveys of the Atakama Cosmological Telescope, as well as the South Polar Telescope in Antarctica. However, the first X-ray observations were carried out with the help of the Spectra-RG observatory, which has been conducting a survey of the entire sky at the L2 Lagrange point since December 2019.

The estimated mass of the cluster from eROSITA data is M500 = (9.0 ± 2.6) 10¹⁴ solar masses. Such massive objects (with masses of the order of 10¹⁵ solar masses) are very rare and deserve further detailed study. The SRGe cluster CL2305.2-2248 is one of several dozen of the most massive galaxy clusters in the entire observable Universe and one of only a few of the most massive galaxy clusters at redshifts z> 0.6.

A high-precision spectroscopic measurement of the cluster redshift, z = 0.7573, was obtained using observations with the 6-meter BTA telescope (Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences). This corresponds to a distance of 6.6 billion light years (about half the lifetime of the universe). Deep photometric measurements of galaxies were carried out at the Russian-Turkish 1.5-meter telescope in Antalya (Turkey), which made it possible to study the galaxies of the cluster.

Spectr- RG (Spectrum-RG) space Telescope

According to the eROSITA telescope, the central part of the cluster looks disturbed in the X-ray range. This may be the result of the impact of floating gas bubbles, which are "inflated" by the active nucleus of one of the central galaxies in the cluster. Another possible explanation is that this may be a consequence of large-scale gas movements, which may arise, for example, due to a recent merger with a cluster of less mass. The distribution of galaxies in the plane of the sky is shaped like an hourglass. Such a strong central asymmetry of the distribution of galaxies in the plane of the sky may indicate a complex dynamic state of the cluster.

In the X-ray survey of the whole sky by the eROSITA telescope on board the Russian observatory "Spektr-RG", about 100 thousand galaxy clusters will be discovered, including all massive clusters with masses above 3·10¹⁴ solar masses in the observable part of the Universe. Their detailed study will help in solving many cosmological problems, in particular, it will put more precise constraints on the parameters of cosmological models.

This work was supported by the Russian Science Foundation grant 21-12-00210.

Source: IKI RAN.

Related links:

Astronomical Journal: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.09252.pdf

Spectrum-RG: https://www.roscosmos.ru/tag/spektr-rg/

IKI RAN: https://www.roscosmos.ru/tag/iki-ran/

ROSCOSMOS Press Release: https://www.roscosmos.ru/32291/

Images, Text, Credits: ROSCOSMOS/Orbiter.ch Aerospace/Roland Berga.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

United States retains interest in Soyuz flights

 

ROSCOSMOS logo.

August 23, 2021

The United States does not rule out the possibility of acquiring a seat in the Russian Soyuz spacecraft next spring as a backup option in case of force majeure with American commercial ships, Sergei Savelyev, Deputy Director General of the State Corporation Roscosmos for International Cooperation, told RIA Novosti.

Soyuz MS manned spacecraft. Image Credit: NASA

“The Americans, as an option, are leaving this opportunity (acquiring a seat in the Soyuz spacecraft in the spring of 2022 - ed.), Counting on Russia's help and assistance, but I can’t say anything concrete yet,” Saveliev said, referring to the possibility of such a flight.

With the advent of new US spacecraft, NASA has repeatedly announced its decision to complete the purchase of seats in the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, but technical difficulties continue to haunt American spaceships, forcing NASA astronauts to continue flying on Soyuz. For example, the Starliner test flight was recently postponed for a long period. Following previous problems with this spacecraft, the United States acquired a seat from Russia for its astronaut's flight to the ISS in the spring of 2021.

Soyuz MS (manned) spacecraft description. Image Credit: ESA

According to data previously announced by NASA, since 2006 the United States has acquired 72 seats on the Soyuz spacecraft from Russia for more than $ 4 billion. During this time, the cost of a ticket for them increased from $ 20 million to $ 90 million.

Source: RIA Novosti.

Related article:

Starliner Returns to Factory, Preparations Underway to Resolve Valve Issue
https://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.com/2021/08/starliner-returns-to-factory.html

Related links:

ROSCOSMOS Press Release: https://www.roscosmos.ru/32272/

ROSCOSMOS: https://www.roscosmos.ru/

RIA News: https://www.roscosmos.ru/tag/ria-novosti/

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: ROSCOSMOS/Orbiter.ch Aerospace/Roland Berga.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

Spacewalk is Postponed

 

ISS - Expedition 65 Mission patch.

August 23, 2021

International Space Station (ISS). Image Credit: NASA

The U.S. spacewalk outside the International Space Station originally planned for Tuesday, Aug. 24 with NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Akihiko Hoshide has been postponed due to a minor medical issue involving Vande Hei.

Image above: On Aug. 17, 2021, Space Station Commander Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency checked the fit of his U.S. spacesuit in preparation for a spacewalk on Aug. 24, during which he and fellow spacewalker Mark Vande Hei will install the International Space Station's third Roll-Out Solar Array (postponed). Image Credit: NASA.

This issue is not a medical emergency. The spacewalk is not time-sensitive and crew members are continuing to move forward with other station work and activities. Teams are assessing the next available opportunity to conduct the spacewalk following the SpaceX CRS-23 cargo resupply launch planned for Aug. 28 and upcoming Russian spacewalks. The preview briefing Aug. 23 is also being rescheduled and will be announced at a later date.

Related links:

Expedition 65: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition65/index.html

International Space Station (ISS): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Mark Garcia/Yvette Smith.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Observatories Assemble: NASA’s Juno Spacecraft Joins Japan’s Hisaki Satellite and W. M. Keck Observatory to Solve “Energy Crisis” on Jupiter

 

NASA - JUNO Mission logo.

August 23, 2021

Sitting more than five times the distance from the Sun as Earth, Jupiter is not expected to be particularly warm. Based on the amount of sunlight received, the average temperature in the planet’s upper atmosphere should be about minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit or a chilly minus 73 Celsius. Instead, the measured value soars to around 800 degrees Fahrenheit or 426 Celsius. The source of this extra heat has remained elusive for 50 years, causing scientists to refer to the discrepancy as an “energy crisis” for the planet.

Recently an international team assembled observations from a trio of observatories -- NASA’s Juno spacecraft, the Hisaki satellite from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaiʻi. -- to discover the likely source of Jupiter’s thermal boost.

“We found that Jupiter’s intense aurora, the most powerful in the solar system, is responsible for heating the entire planet’s upper atmosphere to surprisingly high temperatures,” said James O’Donoghue of the JAXA Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Sagamihara, Japan. O’Donoghue began the research while at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and is lead author of a paper about this research appearing in Nature August 4.

Jupiter Auroral Heating

Video above: Jupiter is first shown in visible light for context before an artistic impression of the Jovian upper atmosphere's infrared glow is overlain. The brightness of this upper atmosphere layer corresponds to temperatures, from hot to cold, in this order: white, yellow, bright red and lastly, dark red. The aurorae are the hottest regions and the animation shows how heat may be carried by winds away from the aurora and cause planet-wide heating. At the end, real data is added with a temperature scale, indicating the observed global temperatures measured in the study. Video Credits: J. O'Donoghue (JAXA)/Hubble/NASA/ESA/A. Simon/J. Schmidt.

Auroras occur when electrically charged particles are caught in a planet’s magnetic field. These spiral along invisible lines of force in the magnetic field towards the planet’s magnetic poles, striking atoms and molecules in the atmosphere to release light and energy. On Earth, this leads to the colorful light show that forms the aurora Borealis and Australis, also known as the northern and southern lights. At Jupiter, material erupting from its volcanic moon, Io, leads to the most powerful aurora in the Solar System and enormous heating in upper atmosphere over the polar regions of the planet.

Image above: Jupiter is shown in visible light for context underneath an artistic impression of the Jovian upper atmosphere's infrared glow. The brightness of this upper atmosphere layer corresponds to temperatures, from hot to cold, in this order: white, yellow, bright red and lastly, dark red. The aurorae are the hottest regions and the image shows how heat may be carried by winds away from the aurora and cause planet-wide heating. Image Credits: J. O'Donoghue (JAXA)/Hubble/NASA/ESA/A. Simon/J. Schmidt.

The idea that the aurora could be the source of Jupiter’s mysterious energy had been proposed previously but observations have been unable to confirm or deny this until now.

Global models of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere suggested that winds heated by the aurora and headed to the equator would be overwhelmed and redirected by westward winds driven by the planet’s rapid rotation. This would prevent the auroral energy from escaping the polar regions and heating the whole atmosphere. However, this new observational result suggests that such trapping is not occurring, and that the westward winds may be relatively weaker than expected compared with equatorward winds.

High-resolution temperature maps from Keck II, combined with magnetic field data from Hisaki and Juno, allowed the team to catch the aurora in the act of sending what appears to be a pulse of heat toward Jupiter’s equator.

The team observed Jupiter with the Keck II telescope for five hours on two separate nights in April 2016 and January 2017. Using the Near-Infrared Spectrometer (NIRSPEC) on Keck II, heat from electrically charged hydrogen molecules (H3+ ions) in Jupiter’s atmosphere was traced from the planet’s poles down to the equator.

Previous maps of the upper atmospheric temperature were formed using images consisting of only several pixels. That’s not enough resolution to see how the temperature might be changing across the planet, providing few clues as to the origin of the extra heat. To improve the situation, the team utilized the power of Keck II to take many more temperature measurements across the face of the planet and only included measurements with uncertainty in the recorded value of less than five percent. This took years of careful work and yielded temperature maps with over ten thousand individual data points, the highest resolution to date.

JUNO spacecraft orbiting Jupiter. Animation Credit: NASA

Instead of high temperatures only in the polar regions near the aurora, which would be expected if the heat was trapped there, these detailed maps showed that the heat in the upper atmosphere was more widely distributed, with a gradual decrease in temperature closer to the equator.

“We also revealed a strange localized region of heating well away from the aurora - a long bar of heating unlike anything we've seen before,” said Tom Stallard, a co-author of the paper at the University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom. “Though we can't be sure what this feature is, I am convinced it’s a rolling wave of heat flowing equatorward from the aurora.”

Additionally, observations from JAXA’s Hisaki satellite showed that conditions at the time of the Keck II temperature observations could generate a strong aurora on Jupiter. From orbit around Earth, Hisaki has observed the aurora-generating magnetic field around Jupiter since the mission’s launch in 2013. This long-term monitoring has revealed that Jupiter’s magnetic field is strongly influenced by the solar wind; a stream of high-energy particles that emanates from the Sun. The solar wind carries its own magnetic field and when this meets Jupiter’s planetary field, the latter is compressed. At the time of the Keck II observations, Hisaki showed that pressure from the solar wind was particularly high at Jupiter and the field compression is likely to have created an enhanced aurora.

Image above: Jupiter is shown in visible light for context with an artistic impression of the Jovian upper atmosphere's infrared glow overlain, along with magnetic field lines (blue lines). The aurorae are the hottest regions and the image shows how heat may be carried by winds away from the aurora and cause planet-wide heating. Image Credits: J. O'Donoghue (JAXA)/Hubble/NASA/ESA/A. Simon/J. Schmidt.

Finally, observations from Juno in orbit around Jupiter provided the precise location of the aurora on the planet. “Juno’s magnetic field data provided us with a ‘ground truth’ as to where the aurora was: this information isn't readily available from heat maps, as heat leaks away in many directions,” said O’Donoghue. “Picture this like a beach: if the hot atmosphere is water, the magnetic field mapped by Juno is shoreline, and the aurora is ocean, we found that water left the ocean and flooded the land, and Juno revealed where that shoreline was to help us understand the degree of flooding.”

"It was pure luck that we captured this potential heat-shedding event,” adds O’Donoghue. “If we’d observed Jupiter on a different night, when the solar wind pressure had not recently been high, we would have missed it!”

More about the observatories and partners:

The research was funded by NASA through the Solar System Observations Program and the Solar System Workings Program as well as JAXA’s International Top Young Fellowship program. Juno is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, Texas. NASA Goddard built and runs Juno’s magnetometer instrument. The W. M. Keck Observatory is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and NASA. The Observatory was made possible by the financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community; the authors are fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain.

Related links:

Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03706-w

Hisaki: https://www.isas.jaxa.jp/en/missions/spacecraft/current/hisaki.html

Keck Observatory: https://www.keckobservatory.org/

Hubble Space Telescope: http://www.nasa.gov/hubble

Juno: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/main/index.html

Images (mentioned), Animation (mentioned), Video (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/GSFC/Bill Steigerwald.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

Following VA254 and VV19, Flight ST34 marks Arianespace’s third successful launch in less than one month

 

Arianespace / Starsem - Flight ST-34 OneWeb patch.

August 22, 2021

Soyuz Flight ST-34 liftoff

Arianespace’s ST34 mission, a Soyuz-2.1b launch vehicle launched 36 OneWeb satellites from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, on 21 August 2021, at 22:13 UTC (22 August, 03:13 local time). ST34 is Arianespace’s ninth launch for the OneWeb constellation, placing OneWeb satellites #255 to #288 (approximately 5518 kg) into a near-polar orbit at an altitude of 450 kilometers.

- Arianespace just successfully performed Soyuz Flight ST34. This latest launch for OneWeb’s places 34 more satellites into orbit.

– Following Ariane 5 VA254 and Vega VV19, ST34 is Arianespace’s third successful mission, with three different launchers, in less than one month, precisely 23 days. With these three missions, Arianespace has placed 41 satellites ranging from 1,4 kg up to 6.190kg into three different orbits (GEO, SSO and LEO) for the benefit of six clients.

– Following this 9th launch for OneWeb, Arianespace has deployed 288 satellites in Low Earth Orbit for their constellation.

Performed on Sunday, August 22 at precisely 3:13 a.m. local time at Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome (10:13 p.m. UTC on August 21), Soyuz Flight ST34 lifted-off with 34 OneWeb satellites onboard, bringing, after the successful deployment, the size of the fleet in orbit to 288. Flight ST34 was the 59th Soyuz mission carried out by Arianespace and its Starsem affiliate. The mission lasted three hours and 45 minutes. The 34 satellites have been separated, during nine separation sequences, at an altitude of 450 km. It was also the third successful launch operated by Arianespace’s teams in less than one month.

OneWeb 9 launch

“Congratulations to all the teams who made this ninth launch dedicated to OneWeb’s satellites a success,” said Stéphane Israël, CEO of Arianespace. “Every single mission is special, but ST34 is the demonstration of our ability, no matter when or where, to deliver the best possible service! We operated three successful launches from two continents in precisely 23 days -less than one month-, with three different launchers, Ariane 5, Vega and Soyuz. Any time, any mass, any orbit: this is once again what we achieved to the benefit of our customers!”

To date, Arianespace has launched 288 OneWeb satellites with nine Soyuz launches. Arianespace will perform 10 more Soyuz launches for OneWeb through 2021 and 2022. These launches will enable OneWeb to complete the deployment of its full global constellation of low Earth orbit satellites before the end of 2022.

OneWeb’s mission is to create a global connectivity platform through a next-generation satellite constellation in Low Earth Orbit. The OneWeb constellation will deliver high-speed, low-latency connectivity to a wide range of customer sectors, including aviation, maritime, enterprise and government. Central to its purpose, OneWeb seeks to bring connectivity to the hardest to reach places, where fiber cannot reach, and thereby bridge the digital divide.

OneWeb satellite

The satellite prime contractor is OneWeb Satellites, a joint venture of OneWeb and Airbus Defence and Space. The satellites were produced in Florida, USA in its leading-edge satellite manufacturing facilities that can build up to two satellites per day on a series production line dedicated to spacecraft assembly, integration, and testing.

The launch of the satellites was operated by Arianespace and its Euro-Russian affiliate Starsem under contract with Glavkosmos, a subsidiary of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency. Arianespace is responsible for the overall mission and flight-worthiness, with the support of Starsem for launch campaign activities including management of its own launch facilities at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. RKTs-Progress (the Samara Space Center) is responsible for the design, development, manufacture and integration of the Soyuz launch vehicle as well as for the 3-stage Soyuz flight. NPO Lavotchkin is responsible for the launch preparation operations and flight of the Fregat orbital vehicle.

About Arianespace

Arianespace uses space to make life better on Earth by providing launch services for all types of satellites into all orbits. It has orbited more than 900 satellites since 1980, using its family of three launchers, Ariane, Soyuz and Vega, from launch sites in French Guiana (South America) and from the Russian cosmodromes in Baikonur and Vostochny. Arianespace is headquartered in Evry, near Paris, and has a technical facility at the Guiana Space Center in French Guiana, plus local offices in Washington, D.C., Tokyo and Singapore. Arianespace is a subsidiary of ArianeGroup, which holds 74% of its share capital, with the balance held by 15 other shareholders from the European launcher industry. https://www.arianespace.com/

About Starsem

Starsem is dedicated to providing international commercial marketing and operation of the Soyuz launch vehicle from the Baikonur cosmodrome. Shareholders in Starsem are Arianespace, ArianeGroup, the State Space Corporation ROSCOSMOS and the Samara Space Center “RKTs-Progress.” http://www.starsem.com/

OneWeb website: http://www.oneweb.world/

OneWeb Satellites website: http://onewebsatellites.com/

Images, Video, Text, Credits: Arianespace/OneWeb/Roscosmos/SciNews.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch