PROBA-2 is the second satellite in the

European Space Agency The European Space Agency (ESA) is a 23-member International organization, international organization devoted to space exploration. With its headquarters in Paris and a staff of around 2,547 people globally as of 2023, ESA was founded in 1975 ...

's series of PROBA low-cost

satellite A satellite or an artificial satellite is an object, typically a spacecraft, placed into orbit around a celestial body. They have a variety of uses, including communication relay, weather forecasting, navigation ( GPS), broadcasting, scient ...

s that are being used to validate new spacecraft technologies while also carrying scientific instruments. PROBA-2 is a small satellite (130 kg) developed under an ESA General Support Technology Program (GSTP) contract by a Belgian consortium led by Verhaert (now QinetiQ Space) of Kruibeke, Belgium. The nominal mission duration was two years. As of 2022, the mission continues.

Mission summary

It was launched on 2 November 2009, with the

Rockot Rokot ( meaning ''Rumble'' or ''Boom''), also transliterated Rockot, was a Soviet Union (later Russian) space launch vehicle that was capable of launching a payload of into a Earth orbit with 63° inclination. It was based on the UR-100N (S ...

launch system together with ESA's SMOS mission. The platform was launched in a

Sun-synchronous orbit A Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), also called a heliosynchronous orbit, is a nearly polar orbit around a planet, in which the satellite passes over any given point of the planet's surface at the same local mean solar time. More technically, it is ...

low Earth orbit A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an geocentric orbit, orbit around Earth with a orbital period, period of 128 minutes or less (making at least 11.25 orbits per day) and an orbital eccentricity, eccentricity less than 0.25. Most of the artificial object ...

(altitude of 725 km). PROBA-2 contains five scientific instruments. Two of them are designated to observe the

Sun The Sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System. It is a massive, nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as visible light a ...

: "The Sun Watcher using APS and Image Processing" ( SWAP, an EUV imager) and the "Large Yield Radiometer" (

LYRA , from ; pronounced: ) is a small constellation. It is one of the 48 listed by the 2nd century astronomer Ptolemy, and is one of the modern 88 constellations recognized by the International Astronomical Union. Lyra was often represented on star ...

), a radiometer made of diamond photodiodes. The Principal investigator teams of both instruments are hosted at the

Royal Observatory of Belgium The Royal Observatory of Belgium (; ; ) has been situated in the Uccle municipality of Brussels since 1890. It is part of the institutions of the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO). The Royal Observatory was first established in S ...

. This institute will also host th
PROBA-2 Science Center
from which the SWAP and

instruments will be operated and their data distributed. There are three other instruments to measure basic space plasma properties: the Dual segmented Langmuir probe (DSLP) (developed by the Astronomical Institute and Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic), the Thermal Plasma Measurement Unit (TPMU), and the Science Grade Vector Magnetometer (SGVM) developed by the

Technical University of Denmark The Technical University of Denmark (), often simply referred to as DTU, is a polytechnic university and school of engineering. It was founded in 1829 at the initiative of Hans Christian Ørsted as Denmark's first polytechnic, and it is today ran ...

References

External links

PROBA-2 Science Center
Spacecraft launched in 2009 European Space Agency satellites European Space Agency Environmental science Space Situational Awareness Programme Spacecraft launched by Rokot rockets Solar space observatories Technology demonstrations {{Europe-spacecraft-stub

Mission summary

See also

References

External links