A second radar satellite was launched by the European Space Agency where the Sentinel-1b was launched into orbit by a Soyuz rocket, blasting off at 6:02 P.M. local time from Sinnamary, French Guiana in northern South America.

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The main mission of this new satellite is to track shipping routes to prevent encountering icebergs and other pollution, along with surveying land surfaces for subsidence, when the Earth shifts downwards to sea level, including many more applications for radar imagery.

The Sentinel-1b will join the Sentinel constellation of satellites and probes, which will also work alongside with the Sentinel 1a spacecraft that was launched in 2014. It will be in operation from the same orbit but within a distance of 180 degrees, so that the pair will be able to map the entire planet in a period of every six days.

This mission will provide a deluge of data consisting of about five terabytes each day, where both satellites will beam data via laser communication systems back to mission ground control. This European Union flagship space project is slated to cost billions of euros, where the satellites are finally working together on a mission known as Copernicus aiming to obtain all kinds of data about the health of the planet.

Copernicus is expected to support a myriad of services that range from air quality updates, crop performance monitoring and even managing water resources and planning transport servces and infrastructure systems.

ESA serves as the technical provider for EU's space endeavor as the Sentinel-1b became the fourth one to launch, following more services for future launches. According to Earth observation director of ESA, Volker Liebig, to date there are 36,000 self registered users of Sentinel data downloading 4 million images, mostly coming from Sentinel-1a, where Sentinel-2a is now picking up since it is equipped with a visible color camera, becoming recently operational. 

Along with the Soyuz launch are four other satellites that were placed into orbit. Three of them were cubesats for university research and one is from the French space agency with a mission known as Microscope, which involves a fundamental physics experiment.

The Microscope satellite will spend the next two years monitoring the occurrence of the "equivalence principle". This involves how gravity can accelerate any kind of object equally regardless of its mass or composition, which is a concept in general relativity.

The Microscope mission will "drop" metal cylinders composed of titanium-aluminium-vanadium and platinum-rhodium to observe if they will fall at the same time and rate in the airless vacuum of space. This experiment will then track these accelerations even if they are a millionth or a billionth of the planet's gravitational forces.