Galileo 6 (FOC FM 02, GSAT-0202, Milena)

Spacecraft nº:

ESA spacecraft nº: 89

Launch data: Designation  40129 / 14050B Launch date  22 Aug 2014 - 12:27 UT Launch site  CSG, ELS Launch vehicle  Soyuz-STB/Fregat-MT Mission  Navigation Earth orbit: Perigee / Apogee  13713 x 25916 km Eccentricity   Inclination  49.75 deg Period  703.12 min

Spacecraft data:

Description:

• An Arianespace Soyuz rocket will launch on a mission from the Guiana Space Center in South America. The Soyuz will carry two Galileo full operational capability satellites for Europe's Galileo navigation constellation. The Soyuz 2-1b rocket will use a Fregat-MT upper stage. Arianespace will oversee the launch.
• GSAT0106 (GALILEO-FM6, GALILEO 6) is one of the 2 satellites for Europe's Galileo navigation network released on August 22, 2014 into the wrong orbit after launching aboard a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana. Before the launch anomaly, officials expected the satellites to be operational by mid-November, joining four other Galileo demonstration satellites launched in 2011 and 2012 to expand the constellation to six spacecraft.
• The FOC satellites have a mass of 733 kg full 660 kg dry and are built by OHB (Bremen) with navigation payloads by SSTL (Guildford) and a propulsion system from Moog ISP (Niagara Falls) with eight 1N MONARC-1 hydrazine thrusters. (Moog ISP is the former Bell Aerospace, which built the Agena engine). The earlier IOV test satellites were partly owned by ESA, but the FOC satellites are owned by the European Union's GSA (Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency), based in Prague. The FOC satellites carry two rubidium and two hydrogen maser atomic clocks and broadcast on L-band; they also carry the MEOSAR search and rescue transponder payload.
• Satellite FM02 is also called GalileoSat-6, GSAT-0202, and Milena; it was to be in plane C7.

Mission details:

• Launch delayed from April and July 2013.
• The first two Galileo FOC (Full Operational Capability) satellites, FM01 and FM02, were launched from the Centre Spatial Guyanais on Aug 22, 2014.
  Soyuz put the payload stack on a suborbital trajectory. The Fregat stage made a first burn to put the stack in elliptical transfer orbit, and then began the coast to apogee. At apogee at 1605 UTC the Fregat made a second burn intended to circularize the orbit at 23500 x 23500 km x 55.0 deg. The satellites separated from the Fregat-MT No. 1039 upper stage at 1615 UTC. Unfortunately the orbit actually reached was 13700 x 25900 km x 49.7 deg, more elliptical than planned and with the wrong orbital inclination, presumably due to a problem with the second Fregat burn.
• The burn appears to have had the correct 1400 m/s magnitude but with an attitude error of 145 degrees (with an uncertainty of at least 10 deg). Reports on the Novosti Kosmonavitiki forum and on russianspaceweb.com indicate that attitude control thrusters may have failed during the coast, leaving Fregat pointing the wrong way at second main engine ignition.
  For some reason its onboard computers did not sense the incorrect attitude.
• The first launch of this series ended in a lower than planned orbit.
• Russian officials report that the failure of the Fregat stage during the Aug 22 Galileo launch was caused when a cryogenic helium line installed too close to a hydrazine propellant supply line caused the hydrazine to freeze. The root cause, according to Arianespace, was a design error that failed to require thermal separation of the lines (and so, specifically, not a quality control error as previously suggested).

Satellite tracking: