Thaindian News

By Venkatachari Jagannathan
Sriharikota (Andhra Pradesh), Sep 23 (IANS) India consolidated its position as a leading global player in the space sector as it Wednesday launched its 16th remote-sensing satellite, the Rs.160-crore ($32 million) Oceansat-2, to study oceans and climate, along with six small European satellites on board a rocket that blasted off from here.

Under a clear blue sky, the 44.4-metre tall, 230-tonne Indian rocket Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), built at a cost of Rs.75 crore, freed itself from the launch pad at the Sriharikota spaceport, around 80 km from Chennai, at 11.51 a.m. and soared upwards with a deep throated growl lugging the 960-kg Oceansat-2 and the six nano satellites all together weighing 20 kg.

It is ’sweet sixteen’ for the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) as the success comes exactly 16 years after the first PSLV flew from here on Sep 20, 1993, in a failed mission.

ISRO Chairman G. Madhavan Nair said: “It is an extremely good afternoon for us. The PSLV is like a wine. As it ages, it improves and gets better.”

In a copybook style, the rocket first spat out Oceansat-2 at an altitude of 728 km above the earth in a sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), followed by the four nano satellites - also called Cubesats, each weighing one kg. The remaining two, each weighing eight kg, were attached to the rocket’s fourth stage.

The six nano satellites are owned by universities - four from Germany and one each from Switzerland and Turkey - and were launched under a commercial agreement.

Soon after the satellites were put into orbit, ISRO’s satellite tracking centres started monitoring them.

Nair added: “Over the years the PSLV launch frequency has improved. From a single launch every year, today we average two launches. This year the total number of launches will be four.”

ISRO will be launching Cartosat, a 650 kg remote-sensing satellite using PSLV and GSat-4 through Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) later this year.

According to K.R. Sridhara Murthi, executive director of Antrix Corporation Limited that is ISRO’s commercial arm, the Indian space agency has a backlog of launch orders from European agencies and these would be completed in a year and a half.

Speaking about the health of Oceansat-2, T.K. Alex, director, ISRO Satellite Centre, said: “The solar panels got deployed as planned. Signals from the satellite have been picked up from our stations in Antarctica and other places.”

Designed to last five years, the cuboid shaped Oceansat-2 will study the oceans’ interactions with the atmosphere. Oceansat-2 will be used for identifying potential fishing zones, sea-state forecasting, coastal zone studies, weather forecasting and climate studies.

The data will be used by India and will also have a good international market. Bulk of the revenue of Antrix is from selling remote sensing data.

Terming many news reports about the country’s first moon mission as “mysterious”, K. Radhakrishnan, director, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, said: “As far as we are concerned the mission is 100 percent successful. Anomalies are not uncommon and the problem needs to be studied in depth.”

Speaking about the next moon mission, he added: “We have completed the satellite design. It will have an Orbiter and a Lander. We plan to take samples of the moon surface for analysis and transmit the data.”

He said Chandrayaan-2 will be launched by 2012 or 2013.

With the launch of Oceansat-2, ISRO now has 10 remote-sensing satellites in orbit. The others are IRS 1D, Resourcesat 1, TES, Cartosat 1, 2 and 2A, IMS 1, RISAT and Oceansat-1.

The other remote sensing satellites slated for launch are the Radar Imaging Satellite and Resourcesat-2.

Vice-President Hamid Ansari, who witnessed the blast-off, congratulated the ISRO team for the successful launch.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also congratulated the scientists for the successful Oceansat-2 launch, saying it would “herald a new beginning in our understanding of the oceans”.

Switzerland is happy with the successful launch of its first satellite and hopes to launch its second Cubesat, which is under development, also from here.

“This is our first satellite and we are happy that it is launched successfully. The satellite was built at a cost of 400,000 euros by an educational institution in Switzerland,” Silva Hostettler, executive director, State Secretariat for Education and Research, Embassy of Switzerland, told IANS here.