CHENNAI: If all goes well with the launch of the polar satellite launch vehicle on Saturday night (PSLV-C49), then the Indian space agency would have launched a total of 328 foreign satellites, all for a fee.
The 26-hour countdown to the rocket launch on Saturday from the first launch pad will begin on Friday afternoon. The rocket with 10 satellites is expected to lift off at 3.02pm on November 7 from the Sriharikota rocket port, a senior official from Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) told IANS.
The nine foreign satellites are from: Lithuania (1 technology demonstrator), Luxembourg (4 maritime application satellites from Kleos Space) and the USA (4-Lemur multi mission Remote sensing satellites).
The rocket’s main payload is India’s EOS-01 radar imaging satellite, formerly RISAT-2BR2 with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) that can image in all weather conditions.
The satellite can take pictures day and night and will be useful for surveillance as well as civil activities.
It all started in 1999, when India first launched foreign satellites (South Korea’s Kitsat-3 weighing 107 kg and Germany’s DLR-Tubsat 45 kg) as piggyback luggage on the 1050 kg Oceansat of the country with the PSLV-C2. rocket.
Since then, over the next two decades, India has launched 319 foreign satellites, including a Chinese satellite, some independently and mostly piggybacking on India’s own satellite.
ISRO also created a world launch record for the largest number of satellites: 104 satellites of which 101 were foreign on a single PSLV rocket on 2/15/2017.
According to the Government of India, ISRO has earned Rs 1,245.17 million over the past five years launching satellites from 26 countries.
During the 2018-19 fiscal year, launch revenue was Rs 324.19 crore compared to Rs 232.56 crore earned in 2017-18.
In the last five years, contracts have been signed with 10 countries, namely: USA, UK, Germany, Canada, Singapore, Netherlands, Japan, Malaysia, Algeria and France under trade agreements, Minister of State of the Union in the Department of Space and Department. Atomic Energy, Jitendra Singh told Rajya Sabha in December 2019.
Most of the foreign satellites launched by the ISRO rocket were small, the heaviest foreign satellites it had launched into orbit in 2015 were the three UK satellites, UK-DMC 3A, 3B and 3C, each with a weight of 447 kg.
While ISRO, which is building a small rocket with a long and winding name – Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) to launch satellites weighing up to 500; Two startups, Skyroot Aerospace and Agnikul Cosmos Pvt Ltd, are also in the process of developing small rockets: Vikram (300 kg payload capacity) and Agnibaan (100 kg payload capacity), respectively.
Niti Aayog member VK Saraswat at an international space conference said the launch of small satellites will be a dominant factor in the global space sector, as around 7,000 satellites are expected to be in the sky by 2027.
According to him, the low-cost launch of smallsats to LEO will be the focus of global satellite communications.
In total, about 7,000 smallsats are expected to be launched between 2018 and 2027 at a total cost of $ 38 billion, Saraswat said.
Be that as it may, the proposed launch of the rocket on Saturday will be the first space mission for ISRO in 2020 from India.
On January 17, 2020, India’s 3,357 kg GSAT-30 telecommunications satellite, which replaces INSAT-4A, was successfully launched in a Geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO) from the Kourou launch base, French Guiana, by an Ariane rocket.
Last year ISRO President K. Sivan said the PSLV rocket lifted 52.7 tons, of which 17 percent are customer satellites.
This time, however, ISRO is silent even on the harmless weight of the country’s radar imaging satellite and that of foreign payloads.
.
