On June 26, 2010 at 21:41 UTC France successfully launched the Ariane 5 rocket-carrier from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou on the northeastern coast of South America (at 06:41 pm in Kourou local time). Ariane Flight V195.
The rocket-carrier orbited the Arabsat 5A satellite and the South Korea satellite - COMS (the Communication, Ocean and Meteorological Satellite).
The Arabsat group, based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, operates a cluster of orbiting satellites to reach millions of homes in over 100 countries across the Middle East, Africa, Europe and Asia, relaying hundreds of television channels and radio stations.
Built jointly by Astrium and Thales Alenia Space, Arabsat 5A is a Eurostar E3000-style satellite with a 15-year design life. It is equipped with with 26 C-band and 24 Ku-band transponders for business services and television signal routing across the Arab world.
Sharing the ride to orbit aboard the Ariane 5 rocket was COMS, a satellite for South Korea to perform three very diverse roles from geostationary orbit.
One of the main utilizations of this satellite is monitoring of the Earth's environment from geostationary orbit. For meteorology, the imager allows observing of fast, evolving situations such as the Yellow Sands in springtime in Korea and other phenomena such as typhoons. Observation of the ocean colour from this orbit also allows the monitoring of very short-term phenomena such as tide effects, which has never been done from any other similar satellite.
It was the 51st Ariane 5 launch, the 37th success in a row. Attachments: | 
