European Space Rocket Launch Goes A Failure Minutes After Takeoff
November 17, 2020 19:20(Image source from: Ndtv.com)
On Tuesday, as per the operator, a European space rocket failed minutes after taking off and it lost two satellites that it was carrying along.
After the Vega light launcher placed Spain’s first satellite into orbit, it experienced technical issues eight minutes after launched from a space centre in Kourou, French Guiana.
Arianespace watched the launch and after taking off at 11 pm local time (0200 GMT), the launcher slowed right before it before it saw an unidentified "anomaly."
In a livestream to track the rocket, the CEO Stephane Israel said
"The mission is lost”.
Arianespace is working on checking what went wrong. For now, they are not sure about what caused the failure.
The satellites around 700 kilometres from Earth, that Vega was supposed to place, got lost during the mission.
Had the launch been successful, the mission would have launched Spain's first Earth observation satellite for the European Space Agency (ESA).
In many years, this launch’s failure is the second. This launch would have placed into orbit Taranis, a French satellite, to observe bright electrical phenomena in the planet's upper atmosphere.
By Neha Makhija