The price of a commercial flight to the International Space Station has risen from $20 million to $21 million, a Russian space official is quoted by RIA Novosti news agency as saying.
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November 10, 2006A Soyuz-Fregat rocket has lifted off from the Russian space base at Baikonur, Kazakhstan, bearing a large European weather satellite.
The rocket carrying the 4.1-tonne satellite MetOp-A lifted off Thursday at 1628 GMT to be placed in an 850-kilometer (531-mile) orbit around the poles.
Five previous attempts to launch the new-generation satellite since July had been thwarted by technical hitches and poor weather.
MetOp-A is billed as the most sophisticated Earth-observation satellite ever built, with 13 instruments to record temperature, humidity, wind speed and ozone cover across the globe, monitor the environment in space and listen out for signals from ships and aircraft in distress.
Europe’s current generation of weather satellites operates at geostationary orbit, providing snapshots of half of the Earth from a distance of 36,000 kilometers (22,500 miles).
MetOp will provide pictures of the entire globe, swinging around the poles in 101-minute orbits while the planet turns.
These images will be in much finer detail than those provided by geostationary satellites and should enable forecasters to speed up accurate medium-range forecasts by half a day, according to MetOp’s operator, the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT).
MetOp will operate in conjunction with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), whose satellite will fly in a complementary orbit in order to maximize coverage.
Two other MetOp (Meteorological Operational) satellites will follow MetOp-A under a 2.4-billion-euro (three-billion-dollar plan) over the next 10 years. Together, they will provide EUMETSAT with data until 2020.
EUMETSAT has pledged three quarters of the cost, with the rest coming from the ESA.
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October 20, 2006The Russian space agency on Wednesday said the attempt to launch a solar sail space vehicle was not successful because the booster rocket’s engine failed soon after it blasted into space, The Associated Press reported.
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June 22, 2005
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