Ariane-5 Europe's successful heavy lifter space craft poised for take off at the ESA Kourou space center in Guiana (North East Coast of South America)
For the complete report from BBC NEWS click on this link
European Space Agency has launched its Goce gravity mapping satellite - and leads new space exploration wave - by Jonathan Amos
Goce left Earth at 1421 GMT on a modified intercontinental ballistic missile from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in north-west Russia. The mission will give scientists new insights into how the interior of the planet is structured and provide key information on how the oceans move. The satellite is part of an armada of European spacecraft being sent up to study the planet.
Also being ordered is the Sentinel series of spacecraft which will be part of the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) project, a joint undertaking with the EU. GMES will pull together all the information obtained by environmental satellites, air and ground stations to provide a comprehensive picture of the planet. Its quest is to generate continuous, cross-calibrated, long-term data-sets that can be used to inform European policies to deal with global change. The Sentinels are needed to fill in data gaps. In addition, Europe is in the process of upgrading its weather platforms, building a third generation of its Meteosat series, and introducing a new class of polar orbiting satellites known as Metop. This huge fleet of Earth-pointing spacecraft will return an avalanche of data on the health of the planet.
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