09/10/2023 (Agence Europe) – On Monday 9 October, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced that the 23rd flight of the Vega launcher had seen its two main satellites launched and released into Earth orbit. The rocket’s main passengers were the THEOS-2 Earth observation satellite, built by Airbus for Thailand’s Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency, and the Triton meteorological satellite for the Taiwan Space Agency (TASA). The European Union’s In-Orbit Demonstration and Validation (IOD/IOV) programme, which enables experiments to be tested in orbit and flight legacies to be obtained (validation in a real environment) for scientific, public or commercial purposes, the SYNDEO-1&2 cubesat mission, which brings together seven IOD/IOV experiments, and the ESTCube-2 and ANSER missions, which are ready-to-fly satellites for in-orbit demonstrations, were also launched. (CG)