The Copernicus Sentinel-1D satellite has joined the Sentinel-1 mission in orbit. Launch took place on 4 November 2025 at 22:03 CET (18:03 local time) on board an Ariane 6 launcher from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.
The Sentinel-1 mission delivers high-resolution radar images of Earth’s surface, performing in all weathers, day-and-night. This service is used by disaster response teams, environmental agencies, maritime authorities and climate scientists, who depend on frequent updates of critical data.
Sentinel-1D will work in tandem with Sentinel-1C, flying in the same orbit but 180° apart, to optimise global coverage and data delivery. Both satellites have a C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) instrument on board, which captures high-resolution imagery of Earth’s surface. They are also equipped with Automatic Identification System (AIS) instruments to improve detection and tracking of ships. When Sentinel-1D is fully operational, it will enable more frequent AIS observations, including data on vessel identity, location and direction of passage, enabling precise tracking.
Sentinel-1D was launched on Europe’s heavy-lift rocket Ariane 6 on flight designated VA265.
00:005, 4, 3, 2, 1, top, allommage de CESR et décollage.
00:15La propulsion est nominale.
00:17Le début de la manœuvre en l'arrivée.
00:36Copernica's Sentinel-1D has started its journey on board Europe's newest rocket, Ariane 6,
00:43hauling itself against the gravity of our planet.
00:49Amazing views, wow.
00:51Sensational images from our onboard cameras.
00:55Right now, we are burning three engines.
01:00Our range operations manager is telling us that everything is going normally.
01:06We can hear the rumble.
01:09I can feel the wall of the room shaking.
01:13We can indeed as it flies over.
01:16Wow.
01:18You can see there the two boosters are doing all the work right now, Samuel.
01:23Yeah, almost all the work, 85% of the effort is indeed brought by the boosters.
01:30It's a giant piece of power because they are filled with 142 tons of propellant each,
01:38and we are burning them in a bit more than two minutes.
01:40So we are actually burning around two tons per second here.
01:45That's really massive.
01:47That's a lot of fuel, and we got a great shot of them there, those two dots.
01:53He's telling us that everything is going normally.
01:55And we should potentially see the booster separation that should arrive soon,
01:59and you can see even the third part of the Vulcan engine at the center of the two boosters.
02:06That's right, the white dot is the Vulcan engine, and there we can see the two boosters now being jettisoned.
02:11See that two boosters, one up, one left down, moving away from the central stage.
02:16And they detach from the rocket thanks to a pyrotechnic device, which is made by a company called Pyro Alliance, who are real experts in this.
02:25Indeed, they are providing pyrotechnic systems, and they are used to separate the rocket, to separate rocket elements, as we see on the screen, like boosters.
02:35We use them for the previous step.
02:38We'll use them again in the next steps of our launch, as you'll see.
02:42Nice, super nice videos here from the onboard cameras, where you can see the boosters moving away.
02:48We get those images, for technical reasons, from the onboard cameras, just a few seconds delay.
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