Europe said goodbye to the Proba-3 probe, which is heading to India for launch

ESA’s Proba 3 mission left Europe last Saturday for its launch base in India, from where it will blast off into space in exactly one month. The mission’s two spacecraft, which will precisely maneuver in Earth orbit so that one casts a shadow on the other, left the Redwire space complex in Kruibeck, Belgium. The two spacecraft flew to the Satish Dhawan Space Center near Chennai to begin the launch campaign.

It’s about ESA’s first mission takes off from India since the original Proba 1 Earth observation mission in 2001, and the transport process has been delayed. Initially, the air transport company did not accept the spacecraft because batteries were already installed on board. The problem was resolved by removing the batteries and putting them in a separate box.

The two Proba-3 spacecraft will be launched together on the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) PSLV-XL launch vehicle. which has the power needed at a reasonable cost to place a combined 550-kilogram pair into a highly elliptical (or elliptical) orbit that would rise to an altitude of 60,000 kilometers from Earth and then descend to just 600 kilometers.

This high orbit is necessary because the pair will fly in active formation for a planned period of six hours around their maximum altitude, where the Earth’s gravitational pull will decrease, as will the amount of fuel needed to fine-tune their position. .

Spanish guide

The mission included an industry team from 14 ESA Member States, including Canada. under ESA leadership of the Spanish company Senerwith Airbus Defense and Space in Spain providing satellite platforms and Redwire Space in Belgium responsible for mission avionics, pre-launch testing and post-launch operations. GMV in Spain and Polandspecializing in formation flights, relative satellite navigation and flight dynamics, and software provider Spacebel in Belgium form the core industrial team.

Proba-3 Main Corona Observation Instrument, ASPIICS (Space Partnership for Polarimetric and Coronal Imaging Research), hosted on the Coronograph spacecraft, will be controlled by the Royal Observatory of Belgium.

Occult probe The mission, equipped with a 1.4-meter disk, has the task of blocking the Sun for the Coronagraph probe during an active formation flight. On the side facing the Sun, it is equipped with its own DARA (Davos Absolute Radiometer) instrument for measuring the total energy emitted by the Sun for climate studies, developed by the Physical Meteorological Observatory PMOD in Davos, Switzerland.

A third instrument, led by the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, 3D electronic energy spectrometer, will measure the dominant energies of angle-resolved electron spectra in the radiation belts surrounding the Earth, providing valuable data for space weather modeling.

Belgian control

Probe-3’s mission will be controlled from ESA’s European Space Education and Safety Center (ESEC) in Redoux, Belgium, which is currently conducting an extensive pre-launch preparation and simulation campaign.

“This ambitious ESA mission has been in preparation for many years because strives to do something in space that was previously impossibleexplains ESA mission director Damien Galano.

“Once in orbit, the two Proba-3 satellites will allow obtaining stable images of the surrounding rarefied atmosphere of the Sun, or the corona, which was previously only visible for a few short moments during Earth’s solar eclipses. To achieve this, the shadow cast between the spacecraft must remain in a precise position, meaning they must fly autonomously in formation with an accuracy of one millimeter, or the thickness of an average fingernail,” he added.

“ESA and our industrial and academic partners have worked diligently to reach this point of flight readiness. “It’s a little sad to finally say goodbye to these unique satellites, but we’re also very excited to move into the final phase before launch,” Galano concluded.