Russian experts examined Fregat booster at the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana after toxic fuel leak, and its manufacturer NPO Lavochkin will investigate the emergency, a spokesman for Russian space agency Roscosmos told Sputnik on Wednesday
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 10th June, 2020) Russian experts examined Fregat booster at the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana after toxic fuel leak, and its manufacturer NPO Lavochkin will investigate the emergency, a spokesman for Russian space agency Roscosmos told Sputnik on Wednesday.
In late May, a Roscosmos spokesperson told Sputnik that on May 21, French experts had seen an oxidizer (nitrogen tetraoxide) vapor detection system alarm periodically going off in the storage site of Fregat booster. To resolve the issue, Russian experts arrived there on June 6.
"On June 8, a group of specialists from NPO Lavochkin began to determine the reasons for the detection of oxidizer vapor at the storage site of Fregat upper stage at the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana. On the first day, Fregat was examined visually and the further scope of the necessary operations was preliminarily determined," the spokesman said.
The data obtained during the inspection has already been sent to NPO Lavochkin for further analysis and development of measures to investigate the causes of an emergency, he said.
The launch of a Soyuz with UAE satellite Falcon Eye-2 was scheduled for April 14 from Kourou and the blastoff with French satellite CSO-2 for the second half of May. Both launches were earlier delayed for a month due to a problem with the Fregat upper stage and later due to the pandemic.
A space industry source told Sputnik in April that the launch of the Falcon Eye-2 satellite was scheduled for September 15, and CSO-2 for October 15; the blastoff of two European Galileo navigation satellites was preliminary scheduled for December 15.
