A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched just an advanced European weather satellite and made its landing on a ship in the sea.
Falcon 9 moved the MTG-shil (MTG-S1) satellite to Geostationary Transfer Orbit at EST (2104 GMT) at 5:04 pm today (1 July) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The first phase of the rocket returned to Earth according to the plan after about 8.5 minutes, touching the SpaceX drone ship “read the bus instructions,” who was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.
According to the SpaceX mission description, it was the ninth launch and landing for this special booster (who is named B1085). In the previous flights of the booster, the Fram2 private astronaut mission was Crew -9 flight to the International Space Station for NASA and a launch of January 2025, which sent two private landers to the moon: Blue Ghosts and Flexibility of Space.
The upper stage of Falcon 9 deployed MTG-S1 about 35 minutes after the liftoff as of today. The satellite will now make its way for the geophysical class (GEO), which is 22,236 miles (35,786 km) above the Earth.
At this height, the orbital speed corresponds to the rotational motion of the Earth, which means that satellites continuously have “hover” on the same patch of the planet. For this reason, GEO is a popular destination for weather and reconnaissance spacecraft.
Other missions for Booster B1085
Meteosat is the second of the third generation (MTG) satellites to fly MTG-S1. The first was MTG-I (MTG Imageer), which launched an Arianspace Ariane 5 rocket in December 2022.
The MTG spacecraft is operated by the European organization for exploitation of meteorological satellites (Eumetsat) of an international group located in Germany, with 30 members states.
After undergoing a checkout period, the MTG-S1 will use its infrared sounder instrument “to capture data on temperature, humidity, air and trace gases, which is used to generate 3D maps of the environment, improved the precision of MTG’s weather forecasting,” European Space Agency (ESA) authorities (ESA) officials called a mission description.
The satellite “will provide coverage on a 15-minute repeat cycle to the part of Europe and North Africa, which gives meteorologists a picture of the entire season of the region, which supplies data on cloud formation and electricity from MTG-I,” he said.
The MTG-S1 also bears a device for another mission: Copernicus Sentinel-4, which is part of the Earth-Evolution Program of the European Union.
According to ESA officials, the device is an ultraviolet, visible, near-concentrated light (UVN) spectrometer, which will monitor the air quality in Europe and North Africa every hour.
“Spectrometer provides high-resolution data on gases that we affect the quality of breathing air, including atmospheric trace gases and pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide, ozone, sulfur dioxide and pollutants such as formaldehyde,” he wrote in the mission description.
“Mission Prahari -5 and Sentinel -5P will complement the missions, providing the Earth’s daily observation from their polar classes.”
editor’s Note: The story was updated on July 1 at 5:40 pm with the news of a successful satellite perpetrator at ET.
