Livia Briese, a spokeswoman for the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, or EUMETSAT, said the rocket had been returned to its hangar after technical problems continued to cause this week's planned launch to be postponed – the last time only two minutes before liftoff.

"MetOp cannot be launched tonight, nor tomorrow. A new launch date has not yet been fixed but we hope to be able to launch the satellite in the near future," Alain Fournier-Sicre, head of ESA in Russia, told Agence France Press.

"The launcher's booster engines must be checked again," he told the news agency.

The satellite, MetOp-A, was to have been put in orbit Monday from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard a Soyuz-ST Fregat rocket, but the operation was postponed until Tuesday, and then until Wednesday due to technical problems.

MetOp-A is 17.6-meters (58 feet) long, including solar panels, and it weighs more than 4 tons. Considered the most complex satellite of its kind, it carries a dozen instruments to measure global weather patterns.

MetOp-A and two sister satellites, scheduled to be launched in the next few years, are designed to provide the highest quality data yet available for weather forecasting and climate monitoring.

The project, a cooperative effort of ESA, EUMETSAT and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, carries an estimated cost of 2.4 billion euros ($3 billion).

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