Ready to take off. The MTG-I1 meteorological satellite was to be launched on Tuesday, December 13 at 8:45 p.m. French time, by the Ariane 5 rocket, from the Kourou space station in French Guiana. Built by the Franco-Italian companies Thales and the German company OHB, this satellite will be used to produce weather forecasts, in particular for the European continent.
MTG-I1, which will complete the fleet of satellites operated by the European Meteorological Satellite Agency (Eumetsat) and the European Space Agency (ESA), will operate in geostationary orbit, 36,000 km from the Earth.
The first generation has been used since 1977, before the development of two more elaborate prototypes in the 2000s. This evolution aims to “Improve weather services”according to Eumetsat, and allow finer forecasts.
The third generation fleet thus carries two new instruments, including a flexible combined imager. This is used to provide a complete photograph of the Earth in less than ten minutes, compared to fifteen for second-generation satellites.
A photo of Europe every 2.5 minutes
A second similar device has a fast mode to capture snapshots of Europe, every two and a half minutes, compared to five for the previous generation. Second innovative instrument: a lightning imager, which captures the presence of lightning and clouds above the Earth. A useful tool for identifying severe weather events, which are becoming more common with global warming.
If the frequency of sending information is improved, allowing better monitoring of climate change, these shots are also of better quality. These new satellites have a resolution of two kilometres: that is to say that one pixel of their snapshot corresponds to two terrestrial kilometres. This resolution can even go up to 500 meters.
These two new satellite imagers will also allow “better qualification of aerosols”, says Sylvain Le Moal, engineer at the Meteo France Space Weather Center, at franceinfo. This is the first time that air quality will be assessed from space and not just on the ground.