14 DAY TRIAL // A Russian-built Rockot delivery system successfully launched the Swarm mission into low-Earth orbit today, November 22, at 12:02 GMT (13:02 CET), officials from the European Space Agency (ESA) announce. The purpose of Swarm is to analyze Earth's magnetic field and its properties.
The rocket successfully injected the three spacecraft into a near-polar orbit around Earth, at an altitude of 490 kilometers (304.5 miles). The satellites were released from a dispenser mechanism in the Breeze-KM upper stage of the rocket, around 91 minutes after launch.
The Rockot rocket blasted off into space from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, near Arkhangelsk, in northern Russia. Just a few minutes after the spacecraft were deployed in orbit, the ESA Kiruna station in Sweden and the Svalbard station in Norway established contact with the vehicles.
“Swarm is about to fill a gap in our view of the Earth system and in our monitoring of global change issues. It will help us to better understand the field that protects us from the particles and radiation coming from the Sun,” comments the director for Earth observations at ESA, Volker Liebig.