A Russian Soyuz-ST carrier rocket was launched on Friday for the first time from the Kourou launch site in French Guiana.
The rocket is carrying two Galileo navigation system satellites, and is fitted with a radar transponder allowing its location to be monitored and controlled in flight.

The European Commission (EC) is investing billions of euros in its own version of the American GPS system.

It expects Galileo to bring significant returns to EU nations in the form of new businesses that can exploit precise space-borne timing and location data.

The Soyuz mission is a long one – it will be several hours before confirmation is received that the satellite pair have been put in their correct orbit 23,000km above the Earth.

The spacecraft are pathfinders for the Galileo system as a whole.

Together with another pair of satellites to be lofted next year, they will prove that Galileo works as designed, from the spacecraft in the sky to all the control and management operations on the ground.

“This phase is called in-orbit validation – IOV,” said Javier Benedicto, the Galileo project manager at the European Space Agency (Esa), the EC’s technical agent on the project.

Source: ESA