On Tuesday 7 March, the European Commission and the European Space Agency (ESA) announced the successful launch of the Sentinel-2B satellite, the fifth satellite in European Union Copernicus environmental monitoring system.
This is good news for the European Commission. The success of this endeavour is expected to be taken into consideration when the budgetary negotiations for the next financial cycle take place.
The satellite was carried into orbit on the smaller Vega rocket, from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana at 22:49 local time on 6 March. The satellite will work binomially with Sentinel-2A, launched in June 2015.
The two Sentinel-2 satellites are made by Airbus and carry high-resolution multispectral cameras (approximately ten metres), with a field of vision of 290 km and five days of comprehensive land coverage, generating enormous quantities of freely accessed raw data.
All the different actors from the European institutions involved in the programmes are delighted. Maros Sefcovic, the Commission Vice President in charge of the Energy Union highlighted the positive boost European space policy is experiencing in the space field by way of the recent adoption of the European space strategy (see EUROPE 11655) and the launches of the initial European navigation Galileo programme services (see EUROPE 11672). The Commissioner for the Internal Market and Industry, Elżbieta Bieńkowska, emphasised that Copernicus is in the forefront of terrestrial observation and was unique in the world.
In Kourou, French Guiana, the different representatives of the project stakeholders also expressed their satisfaction with this latest development. Jan Wörner, the general director of the European Space Agency (ESA) announced that two other satellites from the Copernicus monitoring system, Sentinel-5P and Sentinel-3B, were due to be launched “over the next few months”.
Launch crucial for EU’s space budget. Philippe Brunet, the General Director for “Space Policy, Copernicus and Defence” highlighted the importance of this recent success for the future of the European space programme, “It was absolutely crucial that this launch succeeded because we are entering into a period of budget negotiations with other post-2020 Copernicus goals. It is obvious… that it is easier to ask for more money when missions are successfully undertaken in time than when there are obviously problems”. This was obviously a reference to the difficulties experienced and still being experienced with the European navigation programme, Galileo (see EUROPE 11722).
Vega’s proven reliability. Another source of satisfaction: the Vega launcher has once again confirmed its high level of reliability, given that with this ninth successful example, the launcher has a 100% success rate.
EUROPE will be returning to two aspects of the Copernicus programme: - the absence of a robust methodology to measure the economic ramifications of the programme in the private sector and the possible applications for citizens’ security and the follow-up to refugee flows. (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)