Aeolus rollout

After being sealed within its Vega rocket fairing, Aeolus has been rolled out to the launch pad at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. Here it will join the rest of the rocket in the launch tower in preparation for liftoff on 21 August 2018. Aeolus is the first space mission to acquire profiles of the wind on a global scale. These near-realtime observations will improve the accuracy of numerical weather and climate prediction and advance our understanding of tropical dynamics and processes relevant to climate variability.