MTG-I1

Ariane 5 carried three satellites: the weather satellite MTG-I1 (also designated Meteosat-12) and Intelsat's Galaxy 35 and Galaxy 36 communications satellites, the pair stacked in the upper position of the fairing. A riser added volume for the third payload, and the Galaxy satellites replaced Intelsat's ageing Galaxy 3C and Galaxy 28.

MTG-I1 is the first of the Meteosat Third Generation satellites, developed jointly by ESA and EUMETSAT. Its Flexible Combined Imager has 16 spectral channels, against 12 on the SEVIRI instrument of the previous generation, and captures full-disk images of Earth every 10 minutes. It also carries Europe's first operational Lightning Imager, the first geostationary instrument over Europe able to detect both intra-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning, day and night.