Launched on 17 December, the mission benefitted from the most precise orbital injection ever achieved for Galileo, a near-perfect insertion that confirmed the high performance of Ariane 6. Galileo is the only programme to have flown satellites of the same mass to the same orbit with four launchers, using Soyuz, Ariane 5, Falcon 9 and now Ariane 6.

Satellite separation took place about four hours after launch, followed by signal acquisition and solar array deployment, marking the beginning of the critical launch and early operations phase (LEOP). During this phase, GCC-D teams, under the responsibility of the EU Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA), commissioned the satellites’ essential subsystems, manoeuvred them to point towards the Earth and started an orbital drift towards their target constellation slots.

About seven days after launch, the LEOP was completed and the satellites declared fit for life into space. The commissioning phase was ready to begin.