Indian Space Research Organisation’s rocket polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV) has scored yet again by launching the Indo-French weather satellite Megha-Tropiques and three other satellites.
The PSLV on Wednesday launched into orbit the four satellites from the spaceport in southeastern Andhra Pradesh’s Sriharikota on Wednesday morning at 11 am. The PSLV-C18, weighs 230 tonnes and stands 44 metres tall, ferried the four satellites that together weighed 1,042.6 kg. Around 22 minutes into the flight, the rocket first spat out Megha-Tropiques and followed it up with SRMSAT, VesselSat and Jugnu. The whole process took about 25 minutes from the time of blast off.
With this, India has also become only the second country to launch such a mission — the first being a US-Japan combined mission in 1997. The Rs 80-crore Megha-Tropiques is a joint mission between Indian and French space agencies to study the water cycle and energy exchanges in the tropics.
The chief aim of the project is to understand the life cycle of convective systems which influences the tropical weather and study their contribution to the energy and moisture budget of the atmosphere in the tropical regions.
The main satellite carries three auxiliary payloads with it — two by French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales) and one jointly by ISRO and CNES —and a complementary scientific instrument.
The French space agency Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES) has built three instruments of Megha-Tropiques: SAPHIR, SCARAB and GPS-ROS. The fourth, MADRAS, is a joint effort of ISRO and CNES. The other three satellites launched in the mission are Jugnu, SRMSat and VesselSat-1.
Also Read
Jugnu is a nano-satellite developed by engineers at the IIT-Kanpur, under guidance of scientists at ISRO. Jugnu aims to prove the camera system developed by IIT-K for imaging the Earth in near infra-red region and test image processing algorithms. It also aims to test GPS system in satellite system and test MEMS (Intertial Measurement Unit) in space. The satellite weighs about 3 kg.
The Rs 1.1 crore SRMSat is a satellite developed by the students and faculty of SRM University to measure the pollution levels in atmosphere by tracking CO2 and H2O (water vapour) levels. The satellite weighs about 10.09 kg and uses a grating spectrometer. The third satellite, VesselSat-1 which is 28.7 kg, has been developed by LuxSpace of Luxembourg. It carries AIS or the Automatic Identification System for ships.
“Megha-Tropiques will be five years in orbit and the data is expected to come in two to three weeks (from now),” ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan said in Sriharikota — a barrier island off the coast — at a press conference after the launch. ISRO officials said the organisation was planning to switch on all satellites one by one, after stabilising them.
With this, ISRO’s launch vehicle PSLV has launched 53 satellites, including 27 foreign payloads. On the PSLV launch vehicle, Radhakrishnan said PSLV was a much sought-after vehicle. “We must have the capacity to produce more launch vehicles.”
Megha-Tropiques, with its circular orbit inclined 20 degrees to the equator, will enable climate research and aid scientists seeking to refine prediction models. The last such similar project, The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission — it is a joint mission of NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency designed to monitor and study tropical rainfall — was launched on November 27, 1997.