Satellite launch promises real-time radar imaging of northern hemisphere

According to the European Space Agency, (ESA), the 2.3 tonne satellite lifted off on a Soyuz rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana at 2102 GMT, with the first stage separating 118 seconds later, followed by the fairing (209 seconds), stage two (287 seconds) and the upper assembly (526 seconds).

After a 617 second burn, the Fregat upper stage delivered Sentinel into a Sun-synchronous orbit at 693km altitude. The satellite separated from the upper stage 23 minutes 24 seconds after lift-off.

‘Sentinel-1A opens a new page in the implementation of Copernicus, the second EU flagship space initiative, after the Galileo positioning system,’ Jean-Jacques Dordain, director general of ESA said in a statement. ‘The Copernicus programme will provide European citizens with the most ambitious space-based services in the world for environmental and security applications.’

The mission is the first of six dedicated missions that will make up the core of Europe’s Copernicus environmental monitoring network, which is designed to provide operational information on the world’s land surfaces, oceans and atmosphere to support environmental and security policymaking.