Optus D3 night launch, courtesy of Arianespace

Arianespace has successfully launched

JCSAT-12 for Japan’s Sky Perfect JSAT and Optus D3 destined to be co located with Optus C1 at 156 East.

The launch was made using the Ariane 5 launcher from French Guinea with a one hour launch window starting at 22:09GMT, (08:09 AEST). A replay of the succesful launch is viewable on the web at http://www.videocorner.tv/.

The Optus D3 satellite will allow a quite significant capacity increase for customers locatedin Australia and New Zealand with Pay TV provider Foxtel already announcing 20 additional services to be added to their platform by the end of this calendar year. Optus (Sigtel) commissioned the D series satellites to be produced by Orbital and will be the most powerful satellite of the Optus constellation. The D series will be capable of generating up to 5 kW of payload power, distributing this power over an almost identical Australian footprint to the other D series satellites.