Successful lift-off for the last Vega mission

Fifty-seven minutes after Vega lifted off from Europe’s spaceport, the Sentinel-2C satellite of the European Copernicus programme, developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) on behalf of the European Commission, was placed in sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of around 780 km.

Sentinel-2C will replace Sentinel-2A and continue the legacy of its predecessors, which cover all of Earth’s land and coastal waters every five days, providing high-resolution data that is essential to Copernicus, the Earth observation component of the European Union’s space programme.

The Sentinel-2 mission has been helping scientists improve their understanding of how the climate machine works and the impact of human activities since March 2017, when Sentinel-2B joined its twin Sentinel-2A.

The information gathered benefits a wide range of applications: monitoring the development of crops and forests, studying land use, observing agricultural practices and production. Even applications that were not initially planned are benefiting from the images obtained, one example being the monitoring of coastlines and coastal waters.

The Sentinel-2 mission also supports humanitarian agencies and governments in emergency situations such as landslides, volcanic eruptions and floods…