India a step away from joining elite GPS club
sriharikota (Andhra Pradesh) — India on Thursday afternoon successfully put into orbit its seventh and final navigation satellite - IRNSS-1G - with its own rocket in copybook style.
With this, India successfully completed putting into orbit all the seven navigation satellites to complete the system in the sky.
Exactly at 12.50pm, the PSLV rocket standing 44.4 metres tall and weighing 320 tonnes tore into the afternoon skies with fierce orange flames at its tail.
Gathering speed every second, the rocket raced towards the heavens amidst the cheers of ISRO officials and the media team assembled at the rocket port here.
At the rocket mission control room, scientists were glued to their computer screens watching the rocket escaping the earth’s gravitational pull.
Just over 20 minutes into the flight, the PSLV rocket ejected its sole passenger — IRNSS-1F — at an altitude of 488.9 km.
Soon after this, the satellite’s solar panels were deployed.
The satellite’s control was then taken over by the Mission Control Facility (MCF) at Hassan in Karnataka. Simply put, the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) is similar to the GPS (global positioning system) of the US, Glonass of Russia and Galileo of Europe as well as China’s Beidou.
While the GPS and Glonass are fully functional global systems, the Chinese and the Japanese systems offer regional coverage and Europe’s Galileo is yet to be operational.
India will formally join the select group of nations owning such system once IRNSS is declared operational after checking the systems — space (satellites), ground (ground stations) and the user-end signal receivers.
Only after the system is declared operational, will user-end signal receiver makers seriously get into the manufacture of equipment for use at the retail end, industry officials told IANS. According to Indian space agency the applications of IRNSS are: terrestrial, aerial and marine navigation, vehicle tracking and fleet management, terrestrial navigation for hikers and travellers, disaster management, integration with mobile phones, mapping and geodetic data capture and visual and voice navigation for drivers.
In other words, IRNSS could be said to be the “Indian GPS”.
Apart from the civilian applications, the IRNSS will be used for defence purposes as well.
“The Indian system provides positional accuracy of 10 metres. For civilian usage to bloom and costs to come down, more manufacturers have to start making the navigation signal receivers. That will happen once the IRNSS is formally declared operational,” A.S.Ganeshan, retired programme director of ISRO’s Satellite Navigation Progamme, told IANS.
Ganeshan said once the IRNSS is ready then there will be more development of application software that would be useful for different segments. “The Indian government should mandate the use of indigenous satellite navigation systems by various government agencies and the emergency service providers so that the signal receiver makers are enthused to get into accelerated production mode,” Ganeshan added.
He said once the mandatory usage is there, more software applications could be developed, thereby widening the usage. —