CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A communications satellite that will beam commercial television service to customers in India was sent into Earth orbit Wednesday, flying atop an Ariane 4 rocket launched from South America.
And following the successful space shot, Arianespace chief Jean-Marie Luton confirmed the troubled Ariane 5 rocket -- which has been grounded since last July -- would return to flight on Feb. 28.
That event couldn't come soon enough for the Indian Space and Research Organization (ISRO), however, so Arianespace dedicated an Ariane 4 rocket to the launch of the Indian space agency's Insat 3C, to which agency officials expressed their praise and thanks to Arianespace.
"Insat is a very important satellite system for our country. It has become synonymous with the needs for a developing country like India," said ISRO chairman K. Kasturirangan, who called Insat 3C "so critical, so important -- and therefore we attach the highest level of cruciality to ensure these kinds of satellites are deployed properly, timely and they operate reliably."
Insat 3C is the eighth Indian satellite to be launched by Arianespace and the second of five spacecraft scheduled for launch in the series. The first, Insat 3B, was orbited with the help of an Ariane 5 rocket in March 2000 -- a flight that marked the first commercial use of the Ariane 5.
In addition to providing TV signals, general telecommunications services also will be provided by the 6,050-pound (2,750-kilogram) spacecraft, which is equipped with 30 C-band transponders, a pair of S-band transponders and a single transponder dedicated to mobile communications services.The satellite will be operated from a Master Control Facility at Hassan in Karnataka.
It is not clear if there will be any military applications to this satellite, which was launched as tensions between India and neighboring Pakistan are at a heightened state.
While both nations have nuclear capability, India's space program is more advanced than Pakistan's and includes the capability to launch its own small satellites into Earth orbit on Indian rockets.
For larger payloads, such as Insat 3C, the Indian space agency must rely on contracting launch services from providers such as Arianespace.
Wednesday's liftoff came at 6:46:57 p.m. EST, almost 54 minutes later than planned.
Countdown clocks at the Guiana Space Center were ticking backwards toward a 5:53 p.m. EST launch when everything came to a halt 11 seconds before launch.
Troubleshooting revealed the problem was with the two computers that control the final six minutes of the countdown. Arianespace launch commentators reported there was a glitch in the way the computers were communicating with each other, or that possibly one computer didn't agree with the other one.
As a result, the countdown was aborted and recycled back to the six-minute mark while engineers figured out how to solve the problem. They did so, the clocks were started again and the 18-story rocket -- as tall as the space shuttle -- lifted off without incident.
Spacecraft separation happened on schedule almost 21 minutes later.
Next up for Arianespace: an Ariane 4 is set to carry Intelsat 904 into Earth orbit on Feb. 20.
And then eight days later the even larger Ariane 5 is set to fly carrying the European Space Agency's Envisat 1 environmental research satellite.
Ariane 5 flights have been grounded for some six months while engineers investigated why a pair of satellites were delivered into a lower-than-intended orbit due to a fault in the Ariane 5's upper stage.
The problem was traced to the unwanted presence of water in the rocket engine's plumbing. A change of procedures and some hardware modifications were introduced and then tested and now the vehicle is considered ready to fly, Luton said.
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