Ariane rocket takes off with French spy satellite
Paris, December 18
AP
Yahoo via Reuters
An Ariane rocket lifted off on Sunday from a pad in South America to place France’s third military spy satellite into orbit, Arianespace said.
The unmanned craft roared skyward from a launch center in Kourou, French Guyana, at 1:36 pm local time (2156 IST), the third and last launch of an Ariane-5 this year, the space agency said.
The satellite and six smaller ones were to be placed into orbit about an hour after liftoff, the first time in 11 years that an Ariane rocket carried as many as seven satellites on a single launch.
The Helios 2A military satellite, the rocket’s main cargo, is to rotate in sun-synchronous orbit around 700 kilometres above the earth, Arianespace said.
Among expected functions, the satellite is to monitor possible weapons proliferation, prepare and evaluate military operations and digitally map terrain for cruise missile guidance, the French Defence Ministry said in a statement on Saturday.
Helios 2A, weighing 4.2 metric tons (4.6 short tons), is said to be able to spot objects as small as a textbook anywhere on earth. Equipped with infrared sensors, it is expected to allow France’s military to gather information at night from space for the first time
By: Distiller - 22nd December 2004 at 08:37
Yo, tks for that info…… what abt the GPS accuracy meant for the US ?
The Navstar 2R’s single point spatial accuracy of better than 50ft, planar accuracy better than 30ft.
Differential GPS with a single transceiver is accurate to about 6ft planar and 20ft spatial. And then you can use two transceiver, which gives you accuracy of about 2ft planar.
By: Blackcat - 21st December 2004 at 15:07
Yo, tks for that info…… what abt the GPS accuracy meant for the US ?
By: Distiller - 21st December 2004 at 14:30
Here is the stuff from Alcatel about Helios IIA: http://www.alcatel.com/space/pdf/observation/heliosgb.pdf
Resolution is secret, but you can bet it is in the lower single-digit centimeters.
It might be useful to know that those “others” were (all French except Nanosat 01):
# Essaim 1, 2, 3, 4 — an Elint type (more precise analysis of the Earth’s surface electro-magnetic signature)
# PARASOL — “Polarization and Anisotropy of Reflectances for Atmospheric Science coupled with Observations from a LIDAR”, looking for aerosols and clouds
# Nanosat 01 — a Spanish microsat for communication with Ant/Arctic positions
By: Blackcat - 21st December 2004 at 13:44
whats the resolution of the satellite?
Also, how much is the accuracy of the GPS for the American military??
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December 19, 2004 at 12:15 pm