The final mission of the Ariane 5 rocket will not start on July 4, 2023, due to unfavorable winds at altitude. A new window is scheduled for the night of the 5th to the 6th.
Decidedly, when it does not want, it does not want. This Tuesday, July 4, 2023 was to be D-Day for the final lift-off of the Ariane 5 rocket. only to a few scientific epics, such as Rosetta, JUICE or James Webb.
Worrying winds aloft
But, wham: a press release published that same day by Arianespace announces that the departure scheduled for 11:30 p.m. is no longer planned. In question ? ” Unfavorable winds at high altitude above the [port spatial guyanais] », indicates the company. It is out of the question, therefore, to take an unnecessary risk, especially for a mission which must be the end point of the rocket.
This is the second time that flight VA261 has been thwarted. In mid-June, Arianespace had to revise its schedule due to the detection of an anomaly — ” a risk on the redundancy of a critical function of the Ariane 5 launcher “. ” You’ll think we don’t want to let her go, but it’s just that we’re not taking any risks », joked on Twitter the French space agency.
The new shooting window is now expected on the night of July 5 to 6, between midnight and one o’clock in the morning (Paris time). The farewell flight of Ariane 5 should conclude an operational career marked by a very high success rate – 95.6%, with 110 successes out of 115 flights (of the five failures listed, three are partial failures).
Two satellites are on board the rocket: a German technological demonstrator, called Heinrich-Hertz, and a communication satellite for the army, called Syracuse-4B. The two satellites will be placed in geostationary orbit, 37,786 km apart. After this flight, it is the Ariane 6 rocket which must enter the runway, on a date which remains uncertain.
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