The satellites carried by the PSLV-C9 are meant to serve some critical purposes, including remote sensing and space exploration. Of the two Indian satellites on board, the state-of-the-art remote sensing satellite Cartosat-2A is deemed to be of great value for urban and rural infrastructure development as it will do large-scale mapping. And the Indian Mini Satellite, IMS-1, flown as an auxiliary payload, is meant for remote sensing applications to generate data for indigenous use as well as for sale to potential customers. The eight other nano-satellites carried under commercial agreements are built by various universities and research institutions in Canada and Germany and are designed especially to facilitate the use of the science of nano-technology in satellite and other applications. Moreover, with this launch, Isro and its commercial wing Antrix Corporation have enhanced their credibility as dependable satellite launchers capable of undertaking even complicated tasks. Notably, about six remote satellites of Isro are already stationed in the sky, beaming imageries for different customers and generating resources that amount to nearly a third of Antrix's total revenue of just under Rs 600 crore.
That apart, from the purely technology demonstration and validation angle, the PSLV-C9 seems to have accomplished a rather challenging mission. This is because the fourth stage of its flight required an orientation alteration each time a satellite had to be released into the orbit and this has been done creditably. This assumes significance because the same vehicle is proposed to be used in Isro's plan to send Chandrayaan-1 to the moon later this year or early next year. Isro already successfully manifested in January last year its technical competence in the re-entry and recovery of space capsules. This, coupled with the hoped-for success of the Chandrayaan-1 mission, would pave the way for the more ambitious manned flight, mooted for 2015, with an estimated cost of Rs 10,000 crore, which would be over and above Isro's regular annual budget of around Rs 4,000 crore. However, that would require taking the reliability of Isro's launch vehicle, as well as of the organisation's re-entry and recovery technology, from the present 90 per cent level to 99.99 per cent. That in turn implies several technological challenges which have to be surmounted but, on the strength of Isro's track record, there is no reason to believe that the organisation is not up to the task.
