On Monday, India’s workhorse PSLV, for the first time, injected eight different satellites, including weather satellite SCATSAT-1, into two different orbits.
Here are the details of the launch and payloads:
— The PSLV-C35 will be launched from the first launch pad of Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR, Sriharikota at 9.12 a.m. tomorrow. The total weight of all the eight satellites is about 675 kg.
— The SCATSAT-1 will be released first into a 730 km Polar Sunsynchronous Orbit (SSO) after about 17 minutes and the rest will be injected into a lower orbit of 689 km after around two hours. The flight is PSLV’s longest ever.
— There will be two re-ignitions of the launch vehicle for this purpose. The launch team engineers will shut down and restart the fourth and last stage of the vehicle twice during the flight.
— Besides SCATSAT-1, the others are PRATHAM and PISAT, two academic satellites from India; ALSAT-1B, ALSAT-2B and ALSAT-1N (all from Algeria); and Pathfinder-1 and NLS-19, from the USA and Canada, respectively.
— This will be the 15th flight of PSLV in ‘XL’ configuration with the use of solid strap-on motors.
— The mission objectives of SCATSAT-1 are to help provide weather forecasting services, cyclone detection and tracking. It has a design life of 15 years.
— The five-kg student satellite PISAT carries an imaging camera as payload to capture imagery of 185 km x 135 km area with about 80m/pixel resolution. The satellite is developed by students of PES University, Bengaluru.
— The other student satellite, PRATHAM, is developed by IIT Bombay.
— The PSLV has so far launched 39 remote-sensing satellites of ISRO, including the Chandrayaan-1 of 2008 and the Mars mission of 2013-14.
— It has also orbited 74 foreign commercial and university satellites in a global trend where the demand for its category of launch services is increasing.
(With inputs from PTI)
