The Soyuz carrier rocket with a Fregat booster put a Radarsat-2 earth remote sensing satellite into a solar-synchronized orbit with an altitude of 805 kilometers (about 500 miles) to join the previous Canadian satellite, Radarsat-1, which has been orbiting earth since 1995.
Radarsat-2 has been jointly developed by the Canadian Space Agency and MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates (MDA), which has previously built projects such as the Canadarm.
The satellite will perform a wide variety of missions, including sea ice mapping and ship routing, iceberg detection, agricultural crop monitoring, and marine surveillance for ship and pollution detection.
Commercial launches of Soyuz carrier rockets are managed by Starsem, a European-Russian joint venture, which comprises EADS SPACE, Arianespace, the Russian Federal Space Agency, and the Samara-based Progress design and production center.
Created in 1996, Starsem offers Soyuz rockets for a broad range of mission needs, including satellite telecommunications systems, scientific spacecraft, and Earth observation meteorological platforms.
During the previous launch on October 21, a Soyuz-FG carrier rocket put four U.S. Globalstar communications satellites into orbit.
