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ISRO battled leak in liquid propellant facility

Special Correspondent

Men behind moon mission faced some anxious moments

CHENNAI: It was not only adverse weather that the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) battled but a leak in the liquid propellant servicing facility on the ground before the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C11) rose majestically from its launch pad at Sriharikota on Wednesday at 6.22 a.m. (October 22) with Chandrayaan-1 on board. This gave anxiety to the men behind the mission, who were manning the consoles in the Mission Control Centre at the spaceport in Andhra Pradesh.

George Koshy, Mission Director, PSLV-C11, which put Chandrayaan-1 in its initial orbit, said on Thursday that problems arose when manoeuvres were under way in filling the second stage of the rocket with liquid propellants.

There was a leak in the liquid propellant servicing facility established on the ground.

“We had to overcome that. It has nothing to do with the vehicle itself. It is a remotely operated facility. We corrected the problem,” he said.

Although the mission team lost 10 hours of the 49-hour countdown due to bad weather, it made it up by conducting several pre-launch activities in parallel, Mr. Koshy said. These activities included filling of pressurants and gases.

Dedicated team

He attributed the success of the PSLV-C11 mission to “ISRO’s dedicated team. You will not get such a committed team anywhere else.”

C. Venugopal, Vehicle Director, asserted that despite the loss of time by the adverse weather condition and the technical problem related to the leak, “we were back on track by T-minus four hours,” i.e., four hours before the lift-off at 6.22 a.m. The sequential operations, including electrical checks, were done in parallel. The weather, which was bad till T-minus ten hours, cleared subsequently. “By T-minus four hours, everything was in normal condition,” he said.

Although the PSLV-C11 was a new advanced version of the standard PSLV and it was being flown for the first time, “I had absolute confidence in the vehicle,” Mr. Venugopal said. Its design was robust and its new motors had been fired on the ground. The PSLV-C 11 is also called PSLV-XL. Each of its six strap-on motors carried 12.4 tonnes of solid propellants instead of nine tonnes each in the standard version. The motors were also longer. (Hence they are called XL- extra long/large).

S. Ramakrishnan, Director (Projects), Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram, called the Chandrayaan-1 launch “a historical mission because we are going for the first time beyond the earth’s orbit to a nearby heavenly body (the moon).”

P.S. Veeraraghavan, Director, ISRO Inertial Systems Unit, Thiruvananthapuram, called the mission “a fight against weather.”

The weather cleared exactly when the mission required it and the launch vehicle put the spacecraft into an orbit of 256 km by 22,866 km with an inclination of 17.8 degrees.

“This was exactly as we required. So the launch was a grand success,” Mr. Veeraraghavan said.

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