ISRO successfully launched on Monday its polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV) rocket that slung into orbit five satellites, including the advanced high resolution cartography satellite Cartosat-2B.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) successfully launched on Monday its polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV) rocket that slung into orbit five satellites, including the advanced high resolution cartography satellite Cartosat-2B.
Belching thick smoke, the PSLV-C15 roared into the sky at 9.22 am from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota, Nellore, Andhra Pradesh.
Scientists at the control facility in Sriharikota (about 6 kms away from the launch pad) sat taut as the launch vehicle soared higher into the sky, clapping their hands at every stage of separation. Within 20.47 minutes, the five satellites had been injected into their orbits.
With a clear sky in the background, the first stage of separation was visible at a height of 50.7 km, 113.3 seconds from take off.
Scores of Isro staff, family members and friends watched the launch from the roof of various buildings in the complex. Former Isro chairman Kasturi Rangan and deputy chairman of Planning commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia were special guests at the launch.
“The PSLV-C15 mission, with five satellites on board, has done extremely well,” Isro chairman K Radhakrishnan and his team of scientists said in the post-launch press conference. Ahluwalia congratulated Isro scientists on the launch, saying, “Isro makes the country proud.”
“The uniqueness of this mission is the inclusion of StudSat, a small satellite made by 35 students from seven engineering colleges in Karnataka and Andhra). With this, we hope to attract more students into space activity,” Radhakrishnan said.
The 694-kg Cartosat-2B carries a panchromatic camera capable of imaging a geographical strip of land (swath) of 9.6 km with a resolution of 0.8 metre. “The highly-agile satellite carries a 64 GB capacity solid state recorder to store images taken by cameras, which can be read out later to ground stations. The satellite will help in detailed planning of urban infrastructure development,” the sources said.
The auxiliary payloads include a 116-kg remote sensing satellite Alsat-2A from Algeria, 6.5-kg nanosat NLS-6.1 Aissat-1 built by the space flight laboratory of the University of Toronto in Canada, 1-kg nanosat NLS-6.2 Tisat-1 built by the University of Applied Sciences of Switzerland and pico satellite StudSat.
The PSLV launch was to take place on May 9, but was postponed due to a drop in the pressure in the vehicle’s second stage. This was the first mission by Isro after the failure of the ambitious home-made cryogenic engine powered GSLV-D3 on April 15.
The cost of developing Cartosat-2B and the polar satellite launch vehicle worked out to Rs255 crore.
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