The hitch-strewn launch of a European weather satellite by a Russian rocket was hit by a fresh delay on Tuesday, mission officials said. The 4.1-tonne satellite MetOp-A was to have been launched aboard a Soyuz-Fregat rocket from the Russian space base in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, at 1628 GMT.
But the countdown was stopped several seconds before liftoff, a live television broadcast relayed to the European Space Agency (ESA) headquarters in Paris showed.
Starsem, the company that markets launches by the veteran Soyuz rocket, said technicians were looking into the problem and would say whether the countdown would resume or the launch would be postponed.
MetOp-A is billed as the most sophisticated Earth observation satellite ever built, with instruments to record temperature, humidity, wind speed and ozone cover across the globe, as well as monitor the environment in space.
It should have been launched on July 17 but the operation has suffered three postponements because of technical problems.
Source: Agence France-Presse
