Artwork unveiled on exoplanet satellite

August 28, 2018

European Space Agency

Artist's impression of Cheops, ESA's Characterising Exoplanet Satellite, in orbit above Earth. In this view the satellite's telescope cover is open. Credit: ESA / ATG medialab

Two plaques etched with thousands of miniaturised drawings made by children have been unveiled in a dedicated ceremony held today in Switzerland.

Three years ago, thousands of children were inspired by the study of planets beyond our Solar System and translated their imagination into beautiful drawings, which feature a variety of planets and other cosmic settings. Out of the many excellent entries, over 2700 were selected to fly on ESA's Characterising Exoplanet Satellite, Cheops.

Cheops will make high-precision measurements of stars, monitoring the small changes in brightness due to the transit of a planet across the star's disc, in order to determine the planet's size. Combined with known information about the planet's mass, Cheops will enable the density of the planet to be calculated, and as such determine if it is a rocky, icy, or even a water-world for example – a first step to characterise exoplanets.

"Cheops is ESA's first small-class science mission and its task is big. The first step characterisation of the Earth-to-Neptune size planets that Cheops will target is an essential step to piecing together what these planets are made of, and towards the long-term search for habitable worlds beyond our own Solar System,"says Jan Wörner, ESA Director General.

Cheops plaques unveiled. Credit: European Space Agency

"This unique satellite, the product of European collaboration, has already inspired the young generation, seen in the drawings engraved on the plaques unveiled today as Cheops begins its final stages of preparations before moving to the launch site."

While the satellite was being assembled earlier this year, a team at the Bern University of Applied Sciences in Burgdorf, Switzerland miniaturized the drawings and engraved them onto two titanium plates. Each plaque measures nearly 18 cm across and 24 cm high.

The spacecraft has recently completed a series of tests at RUAG Space in Zurich, Switzerland, and today was presented to media and invited guests with the two plaques now attached.

Cheops plaques. Credit: G. Bucher – Bern University of Applied Sciences

Cheops will soon travel to ESA's technical centre in the Netherlands where the satellite will undergo acoustic and radio-frequency compatibility tests during September, concluding the environmental test campaign. The spacecraft will then return to Airbus Defence and Space, Spain for final tests before shipment to Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.

The satellite, which is implemented as a partnership between ESA and Switzerland, is on track to complete all planned test activities by the end of the year.

Once in Earth orbit Cheops will begin to characterise some of the many extrasolar worlds already discovered, many of which are similar to those depicted in the inspired artwork that will fly into space with this exciting mission.

Provided by European Space Agency </s> The European Space Agency (ESA) has successfully launched its newest satellite into orbit from Europe's Space Port in Kourou, French Guiana.

It is the second satellite launched to join a constellation that forms the European Data Relay System (EDRS), which enables users to observe the Earth almost in real-time, helping to accelerate response times in emergencies.

It will take up position above Europe's low-Earth orbiting observation satellites, enabling the overall constellation to maintain an almost constant connection. Previously, these low orbiting satellites could only transmit information when in direct line-of-sight with their ground stations, which could lead to delays of up to 90 minutes in the transfer of images.

However, the new EDRS satellites can beam information back to Earth in almost real-time, which could prove pivotal during disaster recovery and extreme weather events.

The latest satellite was launched by the Ariane 5 heavy launcher rocket. The Ariane-generation spacecraft has long been the workhorse for Europe in the global space race, launching missions for over 30 years.

The ESA, which was created in 1975, has 22 Member States: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Slovenia is an Associate Member.

The organisation develops the launchers, spacecraft and ground facilities needed for Europe's participation in global space activities. It is working in particular with the EU on implementing the Galileo and Copernicus programmes as well as with Eumetsat for the development of meteorological missions. </s> This is the first European mission to the solar system's innermost planet, and the first expedition to leave for Mercury in 14 years.

For the first time in more than 14 years, a spacecraft is headed toward Mercury — the smallest and innermost planet of our solar system. Known as BepiColombo, the spacecraft’s mission is to unravel the secrets of this enigmatic planet and to find out all that it can about Mercury’s atmosphere, magnetic field, and geology.

As the Inquisitr previously reported, the BepiColombo mission represents a collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) — with both space agencies sending in their own probe to investigate the planet closest to the sun.

“BepiColombo is the first European mission to Mercury, the smallest and least explored planet in the inner solar system. It is the first Mercury mission to send two science orbiters to make complementary measurements of the planet’s dynamic environment at the same time,” explained ESA officials.

While ESA will be deploying the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO), JAXA is providing the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO) — which this summer was given the name “Mio,” which translates as “waterway” or “fairway.”

“It is a fitting name denoting how far the MMO mission has come, navigating its course past important research and development milestones. It also carries the connotation of wishing the spacecraft a safe journey,” JAXA announced in June.

The two orbiters will be packed inside a transport module that launches tonight from Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana.

“The joint ESA and JAXA BepiColombo mission is ready for liftoff at the start of a journey to discover more about planetary oddball Mercury,” ESA tweeted earlier today.

The module will blast off into space atop an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket, which is scheduled to soar to the skies at 9:45 p.m. EDT, notes Space. The BepiColombo module is slated to be deployed about 26 minutes after launch, and is expected to get in touch with mission control soon after that.

To watch the spacecraft fly off to Mercury, tune in to the ESA website and follow the live coverage starting from 9:15 p.m. EDT.

“Walk with us to the launchpad!” the mission’s team tweeted a few hours ago.

Should anything arise to hinder tonight’s launch, liftoff will be pushed back by 24 hours. The mission has a very wide launch window, which lasts until November 29.

The spacecraft will be spending the next seven years flying in the direction of the sun — similar to NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. Just like the U.S. probe, BepiColombo will also swing by Venus for gravity-assist maneuvers — and venture as close as possible to Mercury.

“On its 7.2 year journey to the innermost planet, BepiColombo will fly by Earth once, Venus twice and Mercury six times before entering into orbit,” ESA officials detailed in a news release.

According to The Conversation, the BepiColombo spacecraft is named in memory of Giuseppe (Bepi) Colombo, an Italian mathematician and engineer who first proposed gravity-assist flybys for spacecraft.

This is only the third spacecraft to journey to Mercury, after NASA’s Messenger and Mariner 10 missions set out to map the planet in August 2004 and in November 1973, respectively.

While Messenger orbited Mercury between 2011 and 2015, Mariner 10 performed three flybys of the planet in 1974 and 1975 — and was the first to discover the planet’s thin atmosphere and magnetic field. </s> Ariel, the Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey mission, was selected by ESA as part of its Cosmic Vision plan. The mission addresses one of the key themes of Cosmic Vision: What are the conditions for planet formation and the emergence of life?

Related Post:NigComSat-2 and -3 framework agreement signedGomSpace, AISTECH sign delivery agreement for 100 nanosatellitesOrbital begins production of 81 satellites for Iridium NEXTSSTL delivers 22nd Galileo FOC payloadRussia may sell rocket engines to ChinaSENER and ESA reach an agreement for Proba 3 missionRUAG Space delivers Mars rover camera mastBall Aerospace completes integration milestone for GPIMSovrn </s> The BepiColumbo spacecraft, a joint European-Japanese mission to Mercury, rocketed away from Earth to begin its seven-year trek to the innermost planet.

The BepiColombo spacecraft launched October 19th, at 9:45:28 p.m. EDT, atop an Ariane 5 rocket from an equatorial launch site in Kourou, French Guiana, beginning a seven-year journey to Mercury. The voyage began perfectly, atop towering pillars of flame that lit up the early morning sky and remained visible until the side boosters burned out 2 minutes later, leaving the steady light of the main rocket stage visible as a greenish point in the sky.

BepiColombo’s journey will return it to Earth, past Venus twice, and take it by Mercury six times before finally settling in to orbit on December 5th, 2025. The mission is a combined effort of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

Getting to Mercury is difficult — so difficult that fewer spacecraft have visited Mercury than have visited Saturn. NASA has sent two spacecraft: Mariner 10, which completed three flybys (all over the same hemisphere) in 1974 and 1975, and Messenger, which accomplished its orbital mission from 2011 to 2015.

Messenger was one of NASA’s low-cost Discovery missions. It accomplished a lot with its diminutive payload, producing a global photo map as well as more detailed maps of topography and composition in the northern hemisphere. (The spacecraft’s elliptical orbit took it too far from the southern hemisphere for detailed mapping.) Messenger made discoveries about Mercury’s magnetic field and the tenuous cloud of atoms that fly in space around the planet, confirmed the presence of ice at the poles, and identified places with relatively recent geologic activity. But it left us with more new questions than it answered old ones — as any good survey mission should do.

How can the terrestrial planet with the biggest iron core have so little iron in its crust? Why is its core so big? How can its crust have so much sulfur when it’s the closest planet to the Sun? Why is its magnetic field shifted to the north of the planet’s center? Why do some of Mercury’s craters have dark rays, and others bright? What process formed the bizarre Swiss-cheese features called “hollows”?

Two Spacecraft in One

BepiColombo will bring flagship-class science to Mercury to answer questions both old and new. It comprises two science spacecraft. One, the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO), was built by ESA and will operate in a nearly circular orbit close to the planet. The other, Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO), was built by JAXA and will fly in a much more elliptical orbit, far from the planet. The two will always be in the same orbit plane, making it easy to do simultaneous observations of the behavior of the magnetic field and particles in different locations near Mercury.

BepiColombo’s science package recapitulates Messenger’s but with sharper and broader vision and the advantage of two spacecraft. Both probes carry magnetometers, to study how Mercury’s internally generated magnetic field responds to buffeting from the active Sun. Both carry instruments to study the planet’s exosphere — the neutral atoms and ions knocked off Mercury’s surface by incoming radiation. MMO also has a dust counter, something Messenger didn’t have.

MPO has cameras and spectrometers to take photos and compositional measurements of the surface. From its nearly circular orbit, MPO will get much closer to Mercury’s surface and obtain much sharper images than Messenger could, placing its observations in context with the benefit of Messenger’s map. MPO will try to understand the composition of Mercury’s crust and the nature of its volcanic activity, and will search for evidence of the timing of Mercury’s shrinking along near-surface faults. Messenger hinted at small-scale faults on which shrinking could be occurring today; MPO will try to determine if the innermost planet is still active. Scientists are particularly interested in seeing Mercury’s south pole up close and in detail for the first time, to find out whether it has reservoirs of ices and organic-rich materials, as the north pole does.

It’s not easy to get to Mercury. A spacecraft has to shed a huge quantity of angular momentum to get close to the Sun and settle into orbit around the small planet. BepiColombo will be getting a ride from a third spacecraft built by ESA, the Mercury Transfer Module (MTM). MTM will use solar-electric propulsion, its huge solar panels powering ion thrusters that will continuously fire for most of the journey. Shortly before arriving at Mercury, BepiColombo will drop the MTM, thus avoiding the requirement of slowing down into Mercury orbit with all that extra mass.

BepiColombo has a long way to go, but it’s accomplished the most dangerous part of its mission — the launch. Mercury Orbit Insertion in December 2025 should be a piece of cake by comparison. By the time the spacecraft completes its sixth flyby of Mercury in January of that year, it will be traveling slow enough to be captured naturally, by Mercury’s own gravity, the seventh time the planet and spacecraft meet.

Until then, enjoy this replay of the launch (which starts 38 minutes into the clip)! </s> European and Japanese space agencies said an Ariane 5 rocket successfully lifted a spacecraft carrying two probes into orbit Saturday for a joint mission to Mercury, the closest planet to the sun.The European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said the unmanned BepiColombo spacecraft successfully separated and was sent into orbit from French Guiana as planned to begin a seven-year journey to Mercury.They said the spacecraft, named after Italian scientist Giuseppe "Bepi" Colombo, was in the right orbit and has sent the first signal after the liftoff.ESA says the 1.3 billion-euro (USD 1.5 billion) mission is one of the most challenging in its history.Mercury's extreme temperatures, the intense gravity pull of the sun and blistering solar radiation make for hellish conditions.The BepiColombo spacecraft will have to follow an elliptical path that involves a fly-by of Earth, two of Venus and six of Mercury itself so it can slow down before arriving at its destination in December 2025.When it arrives, BepiColombo will release two probes — Bepi and Mio — that will independently investigate the surface and magnetic field of Mercury.The probes are designed to cope with temperatures varying from 430 degrees Celsius (806 F) on the side facing the sun, and -180 degrees Celsius (-292 F) in Mercury's shadow.The ESA-developed Bepi will operate in Mercury's inner orbit, and JAXA's Mio will be in the outer orbit to gather data that would reveal the internal structure of the planet, its surface and geological evolution.Scientists hope to build on the insights gained by NASA 's Messenger probe, which ended its mission in 2015 after a four-year orbit of Mercury. The only other spacecraft to visit Mercury was NASA's Mariner 10 that flew past the planet in the mid-1970s.Mercury, which is only slightly larger than Earth's moon, has a massive iron core about which little is known. Researchers are also hoping to learn more about the formation of the solar system from the data gathered by the BepiColombo mission."Beyond completing the challenging journey, this mission will return a huge bounty of science," said Jan Wörner, ESA Director General, in a statement.JAXA President Hiroshi Yamakawa, who earlier managed the project, said, "We have high expectations that the ensuing detailed observations of Mercury will help us better understand the environment of the planet, and ultimately, the origin of the Solar System including that of Earth."It is the second recent cooperation between the Europeans and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. JAXA's Hayabusa2 probe dropped a German-French rover on the asteroid Ryugu earlier this month. </s> A British-built spacecraft fitted with Star Trek-style “impulse engines” is on its way to Mercury, the planet closest to the sun.

BepiColombo blasted into space from the European space port at Kourou, French Guiana, at about 2.45am UK time on Saturday. It was carried on top of an Ariane 5, the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) most powerful rocket.

After a tense countdown in French, the rocket rose slowly above a ball of orange flame and thundered into the sky before disappearing into cloud.

Experts say BepiColombo could not only shed light on the mysteries of our neighbourhood’s smallest planet, but also offer new insights into how the solar system formed and even provide vital clues as to whether planets found orbiting other stars – so-called exoplanets – could be habitable.

“If we want to understand our Earth and how life can [begin] on Earth and maybe on other planets, we have to understand our solar system,” said Joe Zender, the deputy project scientist for BepiColombo.

Much progress has been made in the matter, Zender said, but there is a snag. “There is one problem really, which is Mercury. Mercury doesn’t fit.”

Among the puzzles is the planet’s surprisingly high density and that it is thought to have a core that is at least partly molten. With some exoplanets orbiting very close to stars cooler than our own, finding out more about the first rock from our sun has become a pressing matter.

The BepiColombo mission is a €1.6bn (£1.4bn) joint venture between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japanese space agency, Jaxa.

The mission has a hefty price tag, but is arguably something of a bargain because BepiColombo involves not one orbiter but two. Once the spacecraft has been delivered into orbit around Mercury by the ESA-built Mercury transfer module, it will split to lose a protective sunshield and release the Mercury magnetospheric orbiter, built by Jaxa, and the Mercury planetary orbiter, built by ESA.

Mercury is only 58m km from the sun, but it has rarely been in the spotlight. Just wo previous missions have examined the planet’s properties – Nasa’s Mariner 10 probe, launched in 1973, and the more recent Messenger mission, which launched in 2004.

The latest endeavour takes its named from the late Giuseppe “Bepi” Colombo, a professor at the University of Padua who was a key figure in devising Mariner 10’s Mercury flybys.

ESA’s BepiColombo Mercury mission thrives on ambition and co-operation Read more

Both previous missions threw up intriguing results, including that Mercury has a magnetic field. This was a surprise given its leisurely pace of rotation – it takes 59 Earth days to spin on its axis – and the idea that because of its small size, the planet’s core would have cooled and become solid, precluding the existence of a magnetic field. Mercury’s magnetic field is also offset by 20% of the planet’s radius, meaning certain features at the south pole are different to those at the north.

Mercury was also found to have an exosphere, a very thin layer above the surface composed of atoms and molecules that have come from the crust and solar wind.

Before BepiColombo can examine such phenomena, however, it must negotiate two major hurdles.

“The heat is really severe, 450C on one side, but don’t forget the other side is -180C,” said Dr Suzanne Imber, of the University of Leicester, who is a co-investigator on MIXS – one of the Mercury Planetary Orbiter’s 11 instruments – and also worked on Messenger. Our spacecraft “is going from one to the other over a few tens of minutes … our instruments have to operate around room temperature.”

The Japanese orbiter will spin 15 times a minute to avoid being toasted, like a kebab on a barbecue, while the European orbiter will be wrapped in a special multi-layer blanket and have a radiator for protection.

Getting to Mercury is also a head-scratcher. “Mercury is a small body close to the sun, so you could fly straight towards Mercury and get there in a few months, but you can’t stop because the sun’s gravity sucks you in,” said Imber.

The answer is to arrive slowly via an elegant series of laps, with the spacecraft swinging by Earth, Venus and Mercury before entering an orbit in late 2025, then splitting and beginning operations in early 2026.

“We are passing once by the Earth, twice Venus and six times Mercury,” said Zender. “We are going so close to the individual planets that we can use their gravitational forces to change our direction for the next step.”

Artist’s impression of the BepiColombo spacecraft shortly after launch. Photograph: ESA/ATG medialab

The team also plan to examine features of Venus including its internal structure, its chemical composition and its interaction with solar radiation.

Once in orbit around Mercury, the instruments will set to work. An x-ray telescope, MIXS will help to shed light on the makeup of the planet.

“We are going to know in really incredible detail what the surface of Mercury is made of,” said Imber, adding that the team can probe deeper down, too. “When you form an impact crater what you find is that layers of material from under the surface are lifted by the impact and land on the surface,” she said.

Prof Nicolas Thomas, the co-project manager of the Bela instrument aboard the Mercury Planetary Orbiter, said he wanted to investigate the planet’s curious surface features.

“A planet will shrink as it cools and Mercury has cooled a lot. We think the planet has cooled in such a way that its radius has been reduced by 8km over its history,” he said. “There are huge great cliffs that we suspect have been created by this process where this shrinking has gone on but some bits have shrunk and other bits haven’t shrunk quite so much.”

It is a phenomenon Bela will help investigate. “What we do is that we take a seriously large, very scary powerful laser and we fire it up to about 1,000km away from the planet and then we wait for six to 10 milliseconds and we look at the reflected pulse,” said Thomas. By looking at the time it has taken for the light to return, the team can calculate the contours of the surface below, essentially mapping Mercury.

Flight into the furnace of Mercury could bring us closer in hunt for alien life Read more

The BepiColombo mission is expected to last for two years once the orbiters are in position, but the team say it might continue for longer. Once over, the orbiters will be crashed into the planet’s surface.

Prof Emma Bunce of the University of Leicester, who heads the MIXS instrument team, said after watching the launch: “I didn’t know what to expect but it was absolutely amazing, just spectacular, the way it lit up the whole sky and the way the sound eventually reaches you. Quite emotional really.

“You think about the instrument you’ve worked for so many years on sitting on top of that rocket and you hope it’s going to be OK.” </s> Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Giovanna Tinetti: "What is the 'standard model' of planets?"

A telescope to study the atmospheres of planets beyond our Solar System will be launched by the European Space Agency in the late 2020s.

The mission, to be known as Ariel, was selected by the organisation's Science Programme Committee on Tuesday.

The venture will be led scientifically from the UK by University College London astrophysicist Giovanna Tinetti.

"In the next decade we will see many, many planets being discovered - thousands, actually," she said.

"All this is amazing, but we want to go beyond that and start to understand the nature of those planets, how they formed, how they evolved, and ultimately to put our Solar System in the bigger picture," the principal investigator told BBC News.

Ariel will use a metre-sized mirror and instrumentation designed to analyse, in visible and infrared light, the chemical make-up of the gases that shroud distant worlds, or exoplanets as they are known.

This information should provide insights on how certain types of planets come to form around particular stars.

Prof Tinetti explained: "We want to sample lots of planets - some that are small like the Earth or very big like Jupiter; and at different temperatures - extremely hot, warm or temperate - around very different types of stars.

"We want to sample all the extremes and the more normal cases, because what we want to try to understand is the 'standard model' for planets, if such a model even exists."

Ariel (Atmospheric Remote-Sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey)

Image copyright ESA/STFC RAL Space/UCL/Europlanet-Science Office Image caption Artwork: The mission will cost on the order of half a billion euros

Ariel is the latest selection in Esa's Medium Class portfolio. To win the launch opportunity in 2028, the proposal had to beat competition from an X-ray telescope (Xipe) and a mission to study energetic particles around the Earth (Thor).

A detailed technical assessment will now be conducted before the Ariel project is formally "adopted" - Esa legal-speak for "final go-ahead". This sign-off, which should happen in the next two years, paves the way for manufacture of the flight hardware.

Ariel is the third exoplanet venture chosen by Esa in recent years.

Image copyright Max Alexander Image caption Prof Tinetti has already been working on the concept for the better part of 10 years

Already coming down the line is a small telescope called Cheops that should go up next year to better measure the size of these far-off worlds; and this will be followed in 2026 by Plato, a telescope that aims to find "true Earths" - planets the same size as our home world that orbit at the same distance from Sun-like stars.

And the Americans, too, have their dedicated planet-hunters, with the newest, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (Tess), launching in the next few weeks.

But at some point, the science of exoplanets has to move beyond simply finding and counting objects; their chemical compositions and physical conditions have to be determined.

The telescope that will start to make big inroads into this problem is the James Webb observatory, the successor to Hubble.

Due in orbit next year, it will study planetary atmospheres in exquisite detail with its 6.5m-diameter mirror. But the US space agency-led mission will probably only get to look at perhaps 150-200 exoplanets in its first five years of operation because of all the other demands on its time from astronomers.

Ariel, on the other hand, will have the single quest and that should see it characterising in the region of 500-1,000 planets during its primary years in orbit.

Steady platform

And one aspect that would work in Ariel's favour is the absence of any moving parts in its build, commented Plato team-member Dr Don Pollaco from Warwick University, UK.

"The issue with all of these planet experiments is that the signals you are looking for are so incredibly small that any systematics in the instrument itself will dominate the signal," he explained.

"And the systematics are often associated with bits that move. So the great thing about Ariel is that it is fixed-format - nothing changes," he told BBC News.

Ariel is likely to cost Esa about €460m (£405m) for the spacecraft chassis, the launch vehicle and operations. As is customary for science missions like this, the agency's individual member states pick up the cost of the scientific payload.

The UK will have the technical lead on the project and the instrumentation therefore will be assembled at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire.

Dr Graham Turnock, the chief executive of the UK Space Agency, said: "It is thanks to the world-leading skills of our innovative space community that a UK-led consortium has been chosen to take forward the next ESA science mission. This demonstrates what a vital role we continue to play in European collaboration on research in space.

"The Ariel mission is a prime example of the scientific innovation underpinning the wider economy. It relies on the UK's science and engineering expertise, which are at the forefront of the government's Industrial Strategy."

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos </s> Europe launched a rocket from French Guyana on Wednesday, to put a satellite into orbit which will track global winds, allowing for improved weather forecasting, Arianespace said.

The launch took place at 2120 GMT after a 24-hour delay due to adverse weather conditions. The flight was scheduled at just under 55 minutes from liftoff to separation of the satellite.

The “Aeolus” satellite — named after the guardian of wind in Greek mythology — will be placed at an altitude of 320 kilometres (200 miles) above the Earth.

It is part of the Copernicus project, a joint initiative of the European Union and the European Space Agency (ESA) to track environmental damage and aid disaster relief operations.

Aeolus is equipped with a single instrument: a Doppler wind lidar — an advanced laser system designed to accurately measure global wind patterns from space.

“This mission will thus provide much-needed data to improve the quality of weather forecasting as well as contributing to long-term climate research,” Arianespace said in its website.

It described the satellite as the world’s first space mission to acquire profiles of Earth’s wind on a global scale.

Tropical winds in particular are very poorly mapped because of the almost complete absence of direct observations.

The Doppler lidar transmits short, powerful pulses of laser light toward Earth in the ultraviolet spectrum. Particles in the air — moisture, dust, gases — scatter a small fraction of that light energy back to the transceiver, where it is collected and recorded.

The delay between the outgoing pulse and the so-called “backscattered” signal reveals the wind’s direction, speed and distance travelled.

Once per orbit, data is downloaded to a ground station in Svalbard, Norway.

Aeolus is the fifth of the ESA’s planned Earth Explorer missions.

Others already completed or in operation have measured Earth’s gravity and geomagnetic fields, soil moisture, ocean salinity and frozen expanses collectively known as the cryosphere.

The new mission is also Arianespace’s 50th launch for the European Space Agency.
The European Space Agency (ESA) unveils two titanium plaques etched with artwork, which will be part of the outside of the CHEOPS exoplanet-characterization satellite during its orbit around Earth.