Artemis was a
geostationary earth orbit satellite (GEOS) for telecommunications, built by Alenia Spazio for
ESA. The Artemis satellite operated at the 21.5E orbital position
until 2016, when it was moved to 123E to cover the L-Band spectrum rights for Indonesia's Ministry of Defense.
In November 2017, Artemis was retired and replaced to a
graveyard orbit.
The mission was planned for many years, with launch initially intended for 1995 and slipping; it was intended for launch on
Ariane 5
Ariane 5 is a retired European heavy-lift space launch vehicle operated by Arianespace for the European Space Agency (ESA). It was launched from the Guiana Space Centre (CSG) in French Guiana. It was used to deliver payloads into geostationar ...
but at one point there were suggestions that a Japanese
H-II rocket might be used.
Launched by an
Ariane 5
Ariane 5 is a retired European heavy-lift space launch vehicle operated by Arianespace for the European Space Agency (ESA). It was launched from the Guiana Space Centre (CSG) in French Guiana. It was used to deliver payloads into geostationar ...
rocket on 12 July 2001, it originally reached an orbit much lower than planned (590 km x 17487 km) due to a malfunction in the launch vehicle's upper stage. It was remotely reconfigured to reach its intended station by means of a novel procedure. First, over the course of about a week, most of its chemical fuel was used to put it in a 31,000 km circular orbit (by raising first the apogee then the perigee, going via a 590 km x 31000 km orbit). Then, its RIT-10
gridded ion thruster — originally intended for station keeping and for firing a few minutes at a time — was instead kept running for most of 18 months, pushing the spacecraft into an outward spiral trajectory. It gained altitude at the rate of about 15 km per day, until it reached the intended geostationary orbit.
On January 1, 2014,
Avanti Communications, a London-based company, took the ownership of the satellite.
Payload
The Artemis satellite has several payloads
* SILEX (Semiconductor-laser Intersatellite Link Experiment) is a laser link, which has been used both to communicate with the SPOT-4 remote-sensing satellite and with a plane in flight. It uses a 60 mW
AlGaAs laser diode as the transmitter and a photodiode detector, with a 25 cm telescope aperture, and a data rate of 50 Mbit/s; it weighs about 160 kg and uses 150 watts of power. The telescope is in a
fork mounting. The system is designed and built by
Astrium.
* SKDR (S/Ka band Data Relay), a system for relaying data from other satellites built by Alenia Spazio. This uses a 2.85-metre antenna.
* LLM (L-band Land Mobile), a system designed for satellite communication with fairly small vehicle-based terminals in Europe. This uses a second 2.85-metre antenna, providing four beams; one covers Europe from western Spain to eastern Turkey and from the southern point of Tunisia to the north of Norway, whilst three spot beams cover respectively France and Spain; central Europe and Italy; Turkey and south-East Europe.
*
EGNOS navigation-signal transmitter
* An advanced ion propulsion system with 44 kg of xenon propellant
Operations
In November 2001, the world's first laser intersatellite link was achieved in space by the
European Space Agency
The European Space Agency (ESA) is a 23-member International organization, international organization devoted to space exploration. With its headquarters in Paris and a staff of around 2,547 people globally as of 2023, ESA was founded in 1975 ...
(ESA) satellite Artemis, providing an optical data transmission link with the
CNES
CNES () is the French national space agency. Headquartered in central Paris, the agency is overseen by the ministries of the Armed Forces, Economy and Finance and Higher Education, Research and Innovation.
It operates from the Toulouse Spac ...
Earth observation satellite
An Earth observation satellite or Earth remote sensing satellite is a satellite used or designed for Earth observation (EO) from orbit, including spy satellites and similar ones intended for non-military uses such as environmental monitoring, me ...
SPOT 4
SPOT (, literal translation, lit. "Satellite for observation of Earth") is a commercial high-resolution optical Earth observation satellite system operating from space. It is run by Spot Image, based in Toulouse, France. It was initiated by the ...
. Achieving 50
Mbps across , the distance of a LEO-GEO link.
Since 2005, ARTEMIS has been relaying two-way optical signals from
KIRARI, the
.
, Artemis was used operationally for data relay from ESA's satellites in low Earth orbit; a SILEX link to
SPOT-4 was typically established daily. It was also used on a situational basis; for example, it was used in 2008 to relay information from the
automated transfer vehicle Jules Verne while mission control at Houston was unavailable due to a hurricane.
It is now considered a precursor for the
EDRS programme.
Rental Dispute with Indonesia
In November 2017, Artemis was retired into the
graveyard orbit after the
Indonesian Ministry of Defence failed to pay outstanding rental lease for hiring the satellite to
Avanti Communications. The dispute was settled after Avanti won the arbitration case in the
London Court Of Arbitration in 2018, when Indonesia was forced to pay $20million.
References
External links
Artemis news page at European Space AgencyImages of the Artemis satelliteEDRS SpaceDataHighway
{{DEFAULTSORT:Artemis (Satellite)
Communications satellites in geostationary orbit
Satellite launch anomalies
Spacecraft launched in 2001
European Space Agency satellites
Inter-satellite communications satellites