Proton rocket launches Prognoz satellite

Friday, June 27, 2008

At 23:59 GMT yesterday, a Russian Proton rocket, with a Block DM-3 upper stage, launched from Site 81/24 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, placing a Prognoz satellite for the Russian Ministry of Defence into a geosynchronous orbit. Prognoz satellites are used for missile detection, as a defence against nuclear attacks.

The Proton-K configuration was used for this launch. The Proton-K, also known as the Proton 8K72K, is an old configuration, which is out of production. It is believed that three more Proton-K rockets are in storage. The modernised Proton-M, which will replace it, has been in use for commercial launches for several years, and made its first military launch last December.

This is the first launch of a Proton since a failure in March, which left the AMC-14 satellite stranded in a useless orbit. The Briz-M upper stage, whose malfunction resulted in the launch failure, was not used in today's launch, with an older Block DM stage being flown instead. The Briz-M has been cleared for return to flight, and was not used on this mission due to payload requirements, rather than reliability concerns. AMC-14 has now been sold to a new company, and is now in the process of raising itself into a geosynchronous orbit, where it will operate in a limited capacity for a fraction of its planned lifetime.

The launch is the 33^rd of 2008, and the 335^th flight of a Proton rocket. The next Proton launch is currently planned for July, when a Proton-M with a Block DM-2 upper stage will launch three GLONASS navigation satellites.

Have an opinion on this story? Share it!

Sources

Rocket launched from Baikonur to carry military satellite to orbit — ITAR-TASS, 2008-06-27
Старт "Протона-К" со спутником Минобороны РФ прошел успешно — RIA Novosti, 2008-06-27 (Russian)

This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.

Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.

Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.

The text of this article is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License