On 22 April 2001, the 4th Maxus sounding rocket was launched from the ESRANGE range in Northern Sweden. Maxus is Europe's biggest sounding rocket, providing experiments with more than 12 minutes of microgravity.
This programme is the second and last ESA TV Exchange on this mission, outlining the preparation of one of the seven experiments on board. It also includes an account of the miraculous survival of the payloads when they fell at 700 km/h to Earth after the payload retrieval mechanism had failed.
The 5-minute A-roll contains split audio with an English guide track and is complemented by a B-roll.

Falling to Earth 700 km intact - the miracle of Maxus 4 samples
TC 10:00:40
Kiruna, northern Sweden. 200 kilometres north of the polar circle lies the Esrange launch range. This is where Maxus 4 was launched on 29 April 2001. Maxus is the largest sounding rocket ever having taken off from European soil, and it enables scientists to conduct experiments under conditions of weightlessness. Why was it launched here, way up in the North of the world?
TC 10:01:06-Soundbite : Wolfgang Hersfs - ESA's Sounding Rocket Project Mgr
The main reason we launch here in northern Sweden is that we can bring rockets down on land. This means that we can recover the payload and overhaul all the scientific equipment for re-use, which is much cheaper than building new apparatus each time. The other key reason is that for most experiments the scientists need to get their samples back for evaluation. The data gathered during the flights are not the whole picture, there are often metallic or biological samples which need