A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket just launched an advanced European weather satellite and aced its landing on a ship at sea.
The Falcon 9 lifted off from historic Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida today (July 1) at 5:04 p.m. EST (2104 GMT), carrying the MTG-Sounder (MTG-S1) satellite toward geostationary transfer orbit.
The rocket’s first stage came back to Earth as planned about 8.5 minutes later, touching down on the SpaceX drone ship “Just Read the Instructions,” which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.
It was the ninth launch and landing for this particular booster (which is designated B1085), according to a SpaceX mission description. Among the booster’s previous flights were the Fram2 private astronaut mission, the Crew-9 flight to the International Space Station for NASA and a January 2025 launch that sent two private landers toward the moon: Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost and ispace’s Resilience.
The Falcon 9’s upper stage deployed MTG-S1 about 35 minutes after liftoff today as planned. The satellite will now make its way to geostationary orbit (GEO), which lies 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above Earth.
At this altitude, orbital speed matches Earth’s rotational speed, meaning satellites there “hover” over the same patch of the planet continuously. For this reason, GEO is a popular destination for weather and reconnaissance spacecraft.
Other missions for booster B1085
MTG-S1 is the second of the Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) satellites to take flight. The first was MTG-I (MTG Imager), which launched atop an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket in December 2022.
The MTG spacecraft are operated by the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), an international group based in Germany that has 30 member states.
After undergoing a checkout period, MTG-S1 will use its infrared sounder instrument “to capture data on temperature, humidity, wind and trace gases that are used to generate 3D maps of the atmosphere, improving the accuracy of MTG’s weather prediction,” European Space Agency (ESA) officials said in a mission description.
The satellite “will provide coverage of Europe and part of northern Africa on a repeat cycle of 15 minutes, providing meteorologists with a complete weather picture of the region, complementing data on cloud formation and lightning from MTG-I,” they added.
MTG-S1 also carries an instrument for another mission: Copernicus Sentinel-4, which is part of the European Union’s Earth-observation program.
The instrument is an ultraviolet, visible, near-infrared light (UVN) spectrometer, which will monitor air quality over Europe and North Africa every hour, according to ESA officials.
“The spectrometer delivers high-resolution data on gases that affect the quality of the air we breathe, including a wide range of atmospheric trace gases and pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide, ozone, sulfur dioxide and formaldehyde,” they wrote in the mission description.
“The mission will complement the Sentinel-5 and Sentinel-5P missions, which provide daily observations of the Earth from their polar orbits.”
Editor’s note: This story was updated at 5:40 p.m. ET on July 1 with news of successful satellite deployment.