Ariane VA-262 Dummy

Ariane VA-262 Dummy [ESA]

Ariane VA-262 Dummy.

The Dummy payload hosted 5 non-seperable experiments to operate during the rocket's upper stage three-hour flight:

• Peregrinus ias an experiment which was developed by high-school students at Sint-Pieterscollege in Brussels and the Institut Vallee Bailly in Belgium. Peregrinus aims to measure the correlation between Earth’s magnetic field and the occurrence and intensity of X-ray and gamma radiation.
• PariSat is a cubesat developed by the amateur space club Garef Aerospatial in Paris. The group, consisting of members between 15 and 25 years old, built the experiment in their free time. The payload will test eight square plates, which are each just four cm wide, to determine how they operate as in-space radiators.
• SIDLOC (Spacecraft Identification and Localization) is an experiment from a Greek non-profit called the Libre Space Foundation. The goal of SIDLOC is to speed up the process of identifying space missions in orbit.
• LiFi, a payload provided by Oledcomm, will use light to verify the application of a higher-security, high-bandwidth version of WiFi. The 40 by 60 by 16 mm payload consists of two SateLiFe payloads that will communicate with each other using LiFi.
• YPSat (Young Professionals Satellite) was designed and developed by ESA. The mission’s core team is comprised of 30 young professionals from various ESA institutions. YPSat aims to capture all the key phases of Ariane 6’s maiden flight and will take images of various events during the flight. The satellite aims to relay the images down to Earth before reentering.

It was launched on the maiden flight of the Ariane-62 launch vehicle. The stage was to deorbit after about 3 hours, but it did re-ignite due to a auxiliary power unit (APU) failure. This also left the Nyx Bikini and SpaceCase SC-X01 reentry experiments stranded on the stage.