A Japanese H-2A rocket, carrying a 4.6-ton weather and navigation satellite, lifts off from its launch pad at the Tanegashima Space Center on Tanegashima Island in southwestern Japan Saturday, Feb. 18, 2006. The launch of the Japanese-developed rocket was the ninth of the two-stage launch vehicle.
The ninth H2-A rocket took off from the Tanegashima space centre in the southern region of Kagoshima at 06:27 GMT. The weather at the time of the launch was cloudy with a wind speed of 6.8 m/second from the north northwest and the temperature at 7.3 degrees Celsius. At about 28 minutes and 11 seconds after lift-off, the separation and injection of the MTSAT-2 into a Geostationary transfer orbit were confirmed.
"The rocket launch went successfully, but it will take several days before we can find our whether the satellite performs its initial steps and enters the orbit successfully" - Nobuko Sato, Jaxa spokeswoman .
The satellite is due to be inserted into a geostationary orbit some 36,000km above the equator, where it will serve as a backup to an existing weather satellite as well as helping track air traffic in the Asia-Pacific region.
MTSAT-2 was successfully launched atop an H-IIA rocket that is Japan's primary large-scale launch vehicle equipped with high-performance engines with liquid oxygen and hydrogen as propellants. Its operability is highly flexible as it can launch payloads (mainly satellites) of various weights, and inject them into different orbits in the space.
The satellite is designed to spend more than 10 years in orbit serving air traffic control needs and conducting meteorological observations. For its aeronautical mission the satellite sports four Ka-band spot beams, three Ka-band spot beams, as well as one global beam and six spot beams in the L-band. Weather observations will be conducted in the S-band and UHF band.
The spacecraft separated from its booster about 250 kilometres above Earth and will eventually circle the Earth from a geosynchronous orbit of about 36,000 kilometres