Built by Israel Aerospace Industries, The Venus is the world’s smallest satellite of its kind. With all components made in Israel.
On Wednesday at 04:58 Israel time The Venus, the world’s smallest environmental satellite, will soar from the launching pad in French Guiana. Watch the launch at the arianespace website.
It will be accompanied by an Italian satellite and launched from the Guiana Space Center. Which serves as the spaceport of France because it’s very near the equator, enabling launches to gain extra velocity from the Earth’s rotation.
The Venus is a shared project of the Israel Space Agency and the French space agency CNE. It is meant to circle our planet 29 times every 48 hours. It will photograph the exact same places, from the exact same angles, time after time. Enabling the scientists who study the environment to notice any changes in the selected spots.
The camera can operate at 12 different length-waves, some beyond the capacity of the human eye. And it will deliver the information every 48 hours to a receiving station in Northern Sweden, from there the images will be transferred to the French space agency that will send the Israeli-related images to Ben Gurion University in the Negev.
The selected spots in Israel include the Negev, natural reservations, the coast, and parts of Northern Israel.
The sensitivity of the satellite goes beyond photography, it includes the temperature, the nature of the soil, changes in the sea water and in the atmosphere. No other satellite in the world today includes so many different features.
Meant to function for an initial range of two and a half years, the first signal indicating it’s in order and in orbit is to be received in Israel around five and a half hours after the launch (10:30 Israeli time).
As reported by The Jerusalem Post