The Indian Space Research, for the first time in its history, launched eight satellites in one day.
The Indian Space Research, for the first time in its history, launched eight satellites in one day.
SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) — For the first time in its history, the Indian Space Research Organization’s PSLV C-35 rocket launched a total of eight satellites, into two opposite orbits, at 9.12 a.m. on Monday.
The 800-pound SCATSAT-1, a satellite for weather-related studies was placed in the polar sun synchronous orbit at an altitude of 730 km some 17 minutes after the rocket took off from Satish Dhawan Space Center at Sriharikota.
About two hours later, the rocket dispersed two satellites from educational institutions (PISAT and PRATHAM), three commercial payloads from Algeria (ALSAT-1B, 2B and 1N) and one each for Canada (NLS-19) and the United States (Pathfinder-1). The rocket itself required to be re-ignited twice during its flight to place the set of satellites in a different orbit.
Due to the re-ignition, the launch is by far the longest PSLV launch by ISRO. Chairman A.S. Kiran Kumar said the launch marked a “landmark day” in the history of ISRO.
While the ISRO have launched a multitude of PSLV’s in the past, this launch is “the first mission of PSLV in which it will be launching its payloads into two different orbits,” the organization said.
SCATSAT-1 with a life of five years, would provide weather forecasting services through the generation of wind vector products. The PRATHAM by IIT Bombay intends to estimate the total electron count with a resolution of 1km x 1km location grid and PISAT from PES University in Bengaluru intends to explore remote sensing applications.
ALSAT-1B is an Earth observation satellite, ALSAT-2B is a remote sensing satellite and ALSAT-1N is a technology demonstrator. NLS-19 is a technology demonstration micro satellite and Pathfinder-1 is a commercial high resolution imaging micro satellite.
