ORLANDO, Fla. — Europe may shift the launch of a Copernicus Earth observation satellite to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 to avoid further delays in getting it into orbit.
At a press briefing Jan. 11, Simonetta Cheli, director of Earth observation at the European Space Agency, said the agency and the European Commission will decide in the near future whether to switch the Sentinel-1C radar imaging satellite from Vega C to Falcon 9.
ESA, she said, is providing information to the Commission “in terms of options for launch” of the spacecraft. “The Commission is assessing all elements and in the coming days and weeks, we’ll take a final decision considering a backup option of Falcon 9.”
Sentinel-1C is part of Copernicus, the Earth observation program jointly run by ESA and the European Commission. The spacecraft will fill a gap in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) observations created by the failure two years ago of Sentinel-1B. Copernicus has been using data from Sentinel-1A, launched nearly a decade ago, and from other SAR spacecraft while waiting for Sentinel-1C to launch.
ESA announced in 2022 that Sentinel-1C would launch on Vega C in 2023, although there was discussion about moving up the launch to late 2022. However, Vega C remains grounded after a December 2022 launch failure.
At the briefing, Toni Tolker-Nielsen, ESA’s director of space transportation, said the return to flight for Vega C is currently scheduled for mid-November, but suggested that it could slip by a month. “It should be at least before the end of the year. We’re pretty sure of that,” he said.
Moving Sentinel-1C to Falcon 9 could enable an earlier launch, although ESA officials at the briefing did not estimate by how much. “There is the need to launch Sentinel-1C as soon as possible to respond to user requirements of the community,” Cheli said. That shift would also address concerns about placing a key mission on the return-to-flight launch of Vega…
Read the full article here