The European Space Agency (ESA) successfully launched the satellite Sentinel-2A second of the “sentinel” of Copernicus ambitious European program to monitor the environment and monitor changes in the Earth’s surface.
The launch took place at 03:52 local time (1:52 GMT) from the Kourou space center in French Guayuana, and aboard a rocket Vega.
The full Copernicus program has a budget of about 7,500 million euros (8.496 million dollars) and will be the largest civilian system in history dedicated to searching the corners the planet, which is expected to result in direct and indirect revenues of about 30,000 million euros.
This unique project environmental monitoring has scheduled six missions and each is formed by several satellites.
Sentinel-2 is equipped with two satellites, the second of which will be launched in mid-2016, and aims to provide data on environmental management and agricultural areas to characterize crop and from there establish such strategies to optimize fertilizer.
Also permitted under the ESA, track deforestation or desertification in some areas and study the impact of climate change, for example by analyzing the retreat of glaciers.
This complex deployment also alert you to the pollution in lakes and coastal waters and its images of floods, volcanic eruptions and landslides will contribute to managing the consequences of these disasters and help in relief work.
The Sentinel-2A launched today includes a 13-band multispectral camera with high resolution, with a field of view that sweep 290 kilometers wide.
The main contractor has been Airbus Defence and Space in Germany, with the participation of Spanish companies, French, British, Austrian, Swedish, Swiss, Portuguese and Dutch, among others.
The satellite, 3.4 meters long, 1.8 meters wide and 2.35 high, has a mass of 1.1 tons, which weight including 123 kilograms of fuel provided.
The ESA provides detailed that color vision to Copernicus program and therefore is “a perfect fit” to the radar images -adquiridas in any weather, day night- and providing the first satellite fleet, the Sentinel-1A, launched on April 3 last year.
No comments:
Post a Comment