What are your plans for the night of 12 to 13 August? At CNES, we will have our eyes wide open and fixed on the sky for the launch of the third Ariane 6 rocket from the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou! Designated VA264, this mission represents the third flight and second commercial flight of the new European heavy launcher, operated by Arianespace.

The launch is scheduled to take place from Kourou on 12 August at 9:37 p.m. (2:37 a.m. on 13 August Paris time), Arianespace said in a statement. Ariane 6, in its two-booster version, will launch the Metop-SGA1 satellite for the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (Eumetsat). It will place its passenger, the Metop-SGA1 satellite, into sun-synchronous orbit (SSO) at an altitude of approximately 800 km. The satellite will separate 1 hour and 4 minutes after take-off.

Focus on the passenger, Metop-SGA1, and its French instrument IASI-NG

The first European second-generation polar-orbiting meteorological satellite, Metop-SGA1 (Second Generation A1) will carry a total of six imaging and atmospheric sounding instruments that will provide observation data in the visible, infrared and microwave ranges, which are essential for weather forecasting, climate monitoring and a wide range of other services and applications. 

Among these six instruments is IASI-NG, an innovative instrument developed by CNES that measures temperature, humidity and more than 25 atmospheric components with very high accuracy.