Soyuz rocket lifted off from Kazakhstan
Liftoff was at 10:28 p.m. local time in Kazakhstan.
Almaty. September 18. Kazakhstan Today - A Soyuz rocket lifted off from Kazakhstan on Monday and delivered Europe's newest weather satellite into polar orbit, reinforcing the meteorological toolkit of forecasters around the world.
According to Spaceflightnow (online space news), the commercialized Soyuz 2-1a booster launched at 1628 GMT (12:28 p.m. EDT), turned north from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, and climbed on the way to orbit with the second of three MetOp weather observatories for Eumetsat, the European weather satellite agency.
Liftoff was at 10:28 p.m. local time in Kazakhstan.
Shrouded inside the Soyuz rocket's payload fairing, MetOp B is a 9,005-pound spacecraft outfitted with eight instruments to survey clouds, winds, moisture, greenhouse gases, and other atmospheric conditions for at least five years.
"This satellite is critical for forecasts from 12 hours up to 10 days," said Alain Ratier, director-general of Eumetsat.
MetOp B was grounded for four months after the government of Kazakhstan held up the launch to negotiate an agreement on drop zones for the Soyuz rocket's first stage, which fell north of Baikonur.
A Fregat upper stage fired two times to place MetOp B into a sun-synchronous orbit more than 500 miles above Earth, deploying the satellite about 69 minutes after liftoff.
By the end of the year, MetOp B data will be distributed to forecasters around the world. Eumetsat expects to declare the observatory operational by next April or May, when MetOp B will formally replace MetOp A as the weather system's primary satellite.
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