Isro puts Cartosat-2 and 29 foreign satellites into orbit
sriharikota (Andhra Pradesh) — India fired a rocket carrying 31 small satellites into space on Friday, several of them for European countries, in a boost to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ambition to project the country as a global lowcost provider of services in space.
The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) launched a 712 kg Cartosat-2 satellite for earth observation and 30 other tiny satellites from Sriharikota in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh at 9.29am. The rocket is carrying satellites from India and 14 other countries as part of an international commercial arrangement by the staterun Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro).
The 30 satellites weighing 243 kg were from Austria, Belgium, Britain, Chile, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, and the US as well as one Indian nano satellite, NIUSAT.
The Cartosat-2 series satellite for earth observation has a design life of five years.
This satellite is similar to the earlier Cartosat-2 series. The satellites will be used for communications, weather forecasting and monitoring crops. The whole mission got over in around 23 minutes.
“The mission is successful. All the satellites are in the orbit,” IsroChairman A.S. Kiran Kumar said after the launch.
Kumar said Isro will continue work on its earth observation, navigation and communication satellites.
According to Isro officials, the organisation has accelerated the work on developing the semi-cryogenic engine to increase the carrying capacity of heavier rockets geosynchronous satellite launch.
M. Annadurai, Director, Isro Satellite Centre, said the signals from the satellites launched by the PSLV rocket on Friday were good. He said Isro’s satellite systems were getting compact.
According to Isro, the images sent by Cartosat satellite would be useful for cartographic, urban, rural, coastal land use, utility management like road network monitoring, water distribution, creation of land use maps, change detection to bring out geographical and man-made features and various other land information systems and geographical information system applications.
Queried about the strategic use of the images sent by Cartosat, Kumar said the satellite will provide the images and it is for the user agencies to put that to requisite use.
One of the 30 co-passenger satellites is the Indian nano satellite 15 kg NIUSAT belonging to Nooral Islam University, Tamil Nadu.
The satellite will provide multispectral imagery for agricultural crop monitoring and disaster management support applications.
Exactly at 9.29am, the PSLV rocket — 44.4 metres tall and weighing 320 tonnes — tore into the morning skies with fierce orange flames at its tail. Gathering speed every second, the rocket
Congratulations to ISRO on its 40th successful Polar satellite launch carrying 31 satellites from 15 countries. You make us proud. Narendra Modi Prime Minister
raced towards the sky amidst the cheers of the Isro officials and the media team at the rocket port here. The PSLV rocket is a four-stage engine rocket powered by solid and liquid fuel alternatively. “Congratulations to Isro on its 40th successful Polar satellite launch carrying 31 satellites from 15 countries. You make us proud!,” Modi said in a tweet.
Modi’s government has been promoting the space programme as a showcase of low-cost technology. In 2014, India sent an orbiter to Mars at a cost of $74 million, a fraction of the $671 million the US space agency NASA spent on its MAVEN Mars mission.
For all its success, the Indian space programme has a tiny share of the global market. In 2015, the global space industry was valued at $323 billion, according to a Space Foundation report, and India accounted for just 0.6 per cent of that business. —