ISRO Launches 9 Satellites Into Different Orbits

SRIHARIKOTA: The Indian Space Research Organisation announced the successful launch of nine satellites on Saturday from the Sriharikota spaceport.

A Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle in its extended version was used in this project. The project had a countdown of 25 and a half hours. And the PSLV-C54 lifted off with a total mass of 321 tonnes.

This has been one of the longest satellite missions undertaken by the Indian space agency. The first separation was the primary payload, Oceansat in the first orbit. The remaining eight nano-satellites were injected to their own requirements as per customer requirements during the second orbit. They are all in separate Sun-synchronous polar orbits.

The Earth Observation Satellite was placed at an altitude of approximately 742 km. After the primary satellite injection, the vehicle came down more than 200 km to reach an altitude of 516 km for the injection of the first passenger satellite into orbit.

The first and most important is the Earth Observation Satellite - Oceansat. .The newly launched Earth Observation Satellite-6 comes in the third generation of the Oceansat series. It will provide continuity services for Oceansat-2 with extended payload specifications as well as coverage areas. The objective of the whole mission is to ensure data on ocean colour and wind vectors to be streamed continually for operational applications.

The other satellites include ISRO Nano Satellite-2 for Bhutan (INS-2B) which would have two payloads namely NanoMx and APRS-Digipeater. NanoMx is a multispectral optical imaging payload developed by the Space Applications Centre. And the APRS-Digipeater payload is jointly developed by the Department of Information Technology and Telecom, Government of Bhutan, and U R Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru.

The 'Anand' satellite has been developed by Pixxel to demonstrate the capabilities and commercial applications of a miniature earth observation camera in a low earth orbit.

The 'Thybolt' satellites come from another space start-up Dhruva Space and Astrocast is a satellite for the internet of things from Spaceflight from USA.

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