According to NHK, this is the fifth launch of the H-2A with a foreign satellite or an automatic interplanetary station
TOKYO, December 22. /tass/. The Japanese company Mitsubishi Heavy Industries on Wednesday launched an H-2A carrier rocket with a communication satellite of the British telecommunications company Inmarsat. A live broadcast of the launch from the Tanegashima cosmodrome in Kagoshima Prefecture in southwestern Japan was broadcast on NHK.
The rocket launch took place 1 hour later than the scheduled time for additional security checks. Meanwhile, everything else went according to plan, and H-2A successfully put the satellite into orbit.
Initially, the launch was supposed to take place on December 21, but it was postponed to Wednesday due to bad weather conditions. The mass of the Inmarsat satellite is 5.4 tons, the size after the opening of the solar panels is 47 m. It is expected that it will be operated in a geostationary orbit with a height of about 36 thousand km.
According to the TV channel, the incident was the fifth launch of the H-2A with a foreign satellite or an automatic interplanetary station.
