PARIS (Reuters) - A fueling problem aboard a European Ariane-5 rocket caused two multi-million dollar satellites to be dumped into the wrong orbits last month, an independent report on the failed mission said on Tuesday.
The report said the problem kicked in during the rocket's upper stage ignition on the July 12 launch and caused an engine to shut down earlier than expected.
The engine shut-down shoved the satellites into lower-than-planned orbits, placing them in the wrong position to send viewable images back to Earth.
``The Inquiry Board's report identified a combustion instability during the Aestus (upper stage) engine's ignition,'' Arianespace said in a statement.
Arianespace, Western Europe's satellite launch firm, has said that one of the satellites, the European Space Agency's ARTEMIS experimental communications satellite, was being moved into a correct orbit and would carry out some of its mission.
However, a television broadcast satellite for Japan's NHK, the B-SAT 2B, will not be moved and will probably be abandoned.
The ARTEMIS project was valued at over $800 million, while the B-SAT 2B launch cost and satellite was estimated at close to $100 million.
The July 12 failure was Ariane-5's tenth mission.
Its first mission in 1996 ended when the rocket exploded 37 seconds after lift-off from its launch center in Kourou, French Guiana on the northeast coast of South America.
Its second flight a year later also left two dummy satellites in lower-than-planned orbits.
Arianespace said the Ariane-5's flight schedule will be delayed by at least two months.
A planned launch later this month using an older generation Ariane-4 rocket will go off as planned, the company said.
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