Vega C Launches On Inaugural Flight From French Guiana

On June 13, 2022, the European Space Agency launched their Vega C rocket for the first time. The mission carried seven payloads to a medium earth orbit. This was a very important mission for the ESA, so there is a good amount that happened with this mission!

The mission started from ELV-1 at the Guiana Space Centre which is located in Korou of the French Guiana. The solid rocket powered first stage ignited and the vehicle lept off of the pad in a hurry. The vehicle then began its quick pitch downrange similar to other solid rocket powered vehicles such as Minotaur, Vega, Shuttle, and more. The rocket then flew into the low cloud cieling which obscured most of the flight.

Snapshot of the ESA Livestream of the Vega C Launch

However, the views from this launch were amazing as we now finally got onboard views from the first, second and third stage! Great step up for the European Space Agency with their livestreaming capabilities. These videos showed most of the telemetry that was needed to be known. There were also telemetry graphs and readings on the screen aswell.

Now, lets talk about the sequence of events which occured in the flight. The first major event that occured was ignition and liftoff which followed each other in quick succession. Then at 2:26 into the flight the first stage solid rocket motor burned out and was separated. Just one second later, the second stage motor ignited to continue to carry the payloads to orbit. At 5:38 into the flight, the second stage burned out and jetissoned from the third stage. The third stage solid rocket motor then ignited to bring the velocity of the rocket to 8.35 kilometers per second. The third stage shutdown and then released the liquid fueled fourth stage to continue to push to payload into orbit. The fourth stage successfully ignited and shutdown leaving the LARES-2, CELESTA, and more payloads in their targetted medium earth orbit. Now lets talk about the payloads.

LARES-2 is a passive satellite with laser mirrors for the study of the Earth gravitational field and general relativity meaurements and for geodetic purposes to improve the measurements on the LAGEOS 1 and 2 and LARES satellites. LARES-2 is an improved version of the LARES satellite which earlier replaced the LAGEOS 3 project. The main objective for LARES-2 is to expiriment with accurate measurements of General Relativity in space geodesy and geodynamics.

CELESTA is a cubesat which sat along with five other cubesats onboar dthe missions. The cubesat will study the system short-circuits caused by energetic particles and compare the radiation environment in orbit with that produced at CERN's CHARM radiation chamber.

Mission Acheivements

- 83rd Orbital Launch of 2022

- 21st overall Vega mission

- 4th consecutive success for Vega

- 1st Vega launch of 2022

- 19th successful Vega flight

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