On 13 October 2006, an Ariane 5 ECA launcher lifted off from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana on its mission to place two satellites into geostationary transfer orbits and deploy a demonstration antenna. Lift-off of flight V173 took place at 21:56 GMT/UTC (17:56 local time, 22:56 CEST/Paris). The satellites were accurately injected into the correct transfer orbits about 30 minutes later.
The payload satellites were DIRECTV 9S, which will supply television broadcast services to the contiguous United States of America, Alaska and Hawaii, and Optus D1, which will provide fixed communications and satellite broadcast services over Australia and New Zealand.
The mission also carried an additional passenger, mounted on the Ariane Structure for Auxiliary Payloads (ASAP) platform at the base of the payload stack. The Japanese Space Agency's LDREX-2, a 1/25th scale version of an antenna that will be used on the ETS-8 engineering test satellite, was flown to validate the deployment process of the lightweight reflector.
Flight timeline
