CHENNAI, Feb 15:
Buoyed by its successful completion of 100 missions, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is gearing itself for the launch of seven satellites, including the Indo-French collaborative satellite ‘SARAL’, in a single mission later this month.
The launch of the satellites has been tentatively fixed for the evening of February 25 using ISRO’s workhorse Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C20) from the Indian spaceport of Sriharikota, ISRO sources told UNI.
This would be the first mission for ISRO in 2013 and the preparatory works had already begun and were progressing smoothly at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, about 100 km from here.
The core-alone PSLV-C20 (minus its strap-on motors) would carry seven satellites, totally weighing 700 kg, including SARAL (Satellite for ARGOS and ALTIKA), a joint collaboration between India and France, and place them in about 800 km sunsynchronous orbit at around 1800 hrs on February 25, the sources said.
The French space agency, CNES, contributed two payloads to the 400-kg SARAL—Argos for data collection and Altikameter —for measuring the height of the sea surface.
ISRO has provided the satellite bus (satellite frame) and built the satellite.
The data generated by SARAL would be shared by France and India.
The launch of the other satellites would be on commercial basis that fetches revenue for ISRO, which was the most sought after agency for proving its trustworthiness in launching multiple satellites in a single mission.
Using PSLV-C9, ISRO created a world record by successfully launching 10 satellites in one mission on April 28, 2008, that included CARTOSAT-2A, IMS-1 and eight foreign nano satellites.
The other satellites that would ride piggy back with SARAL included two Canadian satellites, the 82 kg NEOSSat (Near Earth Object Space Surveillance Satellite), the world’s first space telescope designed by Canadian Space Agency (CSA), and the 148-kg Sapphire satellite built by MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA), besides two satellites from Austria and one each from UK and Denmark.
According to CSA, NEOSSat would detect and track asteroids and satellites circling the globe every 100 minutes and scanning space near the Sun to pin point otherwise almost invisible asteroids.
The satellite would also be useful in tracking resident space objects including space debris, while Sapphire would look for resident space objects that includes functioning satellites and space debris circling between 6,000 km and 40,000 km above the earth.
The other four satellites to be ferried by PSLV-C20 were ‘BRITE’ and ‘UniBRITE’ (both from Austria, weighing 14 kg each), a Smartphone-sat STRaND-1 from UK and Denmark’s Aalborg University’s satellite, AAUSAT, weighing three kg.
‘STRaND-1’ would be the world’s first ‘smartphone-satellite’, built in Guildford by volunteers from the Surrey Space Centre (SSC) and Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL). (PTI)
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