Indian rocket puts a record 10 satellites into orbit

19 hours ago

BANGALORE, India (AFP) -- An Indian rocket launched a record 10 satellites into orbit in a single mission Monday, underlining the nation's emergence as a major competitor in the multi-billion-dollar space market.

The PSLV rocket ejected all the satellites within minutes of each other after liftoff at 9:20 a.m. (0350 GMT) in clear weather from the Sriharikota space station in southern India, the Indian Space Research Organisation said.

"The initial signals indicate normal health of the satellites," the Bangalore-based agency said in a statement posted on its website, www.isro.org.

The mission's success demonstrated India's ability to launch multiple payloads into precise orbit as it seeks to reap commercial benefits from its 45-year-old space programme.

It was the 13th flight of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, which has "repeatedly proved itself as a reliable and versatile workhorse launch vehicle," said ISRO.

Soaring into clear skies and leaving behind a trail of orange and white smoke, the rocket first put into orbit the 690-kilogram (1,518-pound) remote-sensing Indian satellite, Cartosat-2A.

It also launched an 83-kilogram Indian mini-satellite and a cluster of eight so-called nano-satellites, each weighing between three kilograms and 16 kilograms, built by research institutions from Europe, Canada and Japan.

"The mission was perfect," said ISRO chairman G. Madhavan after the launch was telecast live by public broadcaster Doordarshan.

"It is a historic moment for us because it is the first time that we have launched 10 satellites in a single mission," he added.

The flight broke the previous record of eight satellites launched at one go by a Russian rocket, according to Indian news reports.

ISRO marketing arm Antrix Corporation charged a fee for the launch of the miniature foreign satellites. India has been offering its services at about 60 to 70 percent of the cost charged by other space agencies.

New Delhi wants to compete alongside the United States, Russia, China, the Ukraine and the European Space Agency in offering commercial satellite launch services.

"By launching so many satellites at one go, India has showcased the commercial applicability of its space programme," said Ajay Lele, a space expert at the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses in New Delhi.

"It wants to market its launch systems and also its capability in earth imagery," Lele said. "The mission is very significant from a commercial point of view."

India first staked its case for a share of the commercial launch market by sending an Italian spacecraft into orbit in April last year. In January, it launched an Israeli spy satellite in the face of Iranian protests.

India carried out the first successful launch of a domestic satellite by a home-built rocket in 1980, when it was less preoccupied with reaping commercial benefits and more with harnessing space technology to boost deficient communications and broadcasting facilities.

Cartosat-2A, the main satellite launched Monday to an altitude of 630 kilometres (391 miles) above earth, also has a domestic economic dimension and can be used for intelligence gathering as well, officials say.

More advanced than a predecessor launched in January 2007, it will boost India's efforts to reinforce urban and rural infrastructure to keep pace with economic growth that averaged nearly nine percent in the past four years.

The all-weather satellite, whose camera will beam "very clear and detailed images of even miniscule objects" on earth, will aid economic planners in land and water resources management, said space expert Lele.

Monday's mission precedes the planned launch this year of a lunar mission, which will see India join Asian nations Japan and China in moon exploration.

Source - http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gfD9gU2MIgAC-KJZzBPXSFfD3TJw

I watched the launch live! Congratulations to ISRO team! This is good! The next step is the moon .

I watched the launch live! Congratulations to ISRO team! This is good! The next step is the moon .

Actually, the next step is to send a manned spacecraft out into space, and then a manned mission to the moon after that.

That may be the long term plan, but in june or july of this year, India is going to send a spacecraft to the moon. The payload will also consist of missions for 5-6 other countries as well.

Wednesday, 30 April 2008 11:30 UK

India's growing strides in space

By Pallava Bagla


Monday's launch was carried live on state television

India is well known today for its software and information technology industry.

Less well known is that in a nation where more than 300 million people live on less than $1 a day, it is also a real force to reckon with when it comes to top class rocket and satellite technology.

On Monday the Indian space agency created a world record by successfully launching 10 satellites in one go.

That shattered the previous record of a Russian rocket that successfully launched eight satellites last year.

Launching 10 satellites requires immense precision. When the tricky operation starts the rocket is already travelling at 7.5 kilometres per second.

Jean-Yves Le Gall, CEO of Arianspace, Paris, says "simultaneously launching 10 satellites is a great achievement".

The Indian space agency, set up 35 years ago, is still really a baby among the world's space-faring nations. This was its 26th launch of a rocket from India's only space centre, Sriharikota, situated on the Bay of Bengal coast in southern India.

Compare this to the hundreds of launches that have been undertaken by Nasa and their Russian and European counterparts.

Impressive

The 16,000-employee Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) has mastered these demanding space technologies with little outside help because of Delhi's decision to go ahead with nuclear testing way back in 1974.

So its achievements are all the more impressive.

India has a whopping 11 national communications satellites in orbit at present. That is the largest constellation for any country in the Asia-Pacific region.


India's space programme is more than 45 years old

Today the country undoubtedly has one of the largest national networks of operational satellites anywhere in the world.

Isro argues that it's a profitable business - for every $1 spent on the space programme the return has been $2.

Its budget is less than $1bn a year, compared with more than $17bn that Nasa spends.

India's remote sensing capabilities are almost legendary.

Today there are seven Indian-made and operated remote sensing satellites in orbit, the largest number of any country in the civilian domain.

They can map at a resolution of less than a metre, which means you can literally count the number of soldiers marching in a formation, anywhere on Earth.

Almost a third of the global market for remote sensing images at a resolution of 5-6 metres has already been captured by India.

The new mapping satellite of the Cartosat series put into orbit on Monday will provide even higher resolution images to the global community as it joins its Indian twin that has already been functioning since early last year.

Knocking on the door

But to capture a significant part of the $140bn satellite launch market may take a long time as India's larger rocket, the Geo-synchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV), is still in its adolescence.

Isro has a long wait before joining the big boys' club of the USA, Russia, France, Japan and China - but India is knocking at the door.

The Indian rocket used on Monday was the smaller Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV).

It weighed a whopping 230 tons - as much as 50 elephants - and stands as high as a 12-storey building.

The launch earned India more than $500,000.


'Simultaneously launching 10 satellites is a great achievement'

Almost 15 minutes into the flight the 690kg Indian mapping satellite called Cartosat 2-A was put into orbit.

It was the most important passenger on board and is really a high resolution mapping satellite, which can, from its perch of more than 600km distinguish objects as small as a car.

Almost a minute later an experimental remote sensing satellite called the Indian Mini Satellite-1 was put into orbit.

Now with the two big daddies out of the way, the trickiest part was dropping off all the "babies" on board.

They are really nano-satellites, each weighing 3-16kg. These were dropped of one by one, with gaps of 20 seconds. It was all over in less than 20 minutes after lift-off.

These experimental nano-satellites have been made by university students from Canada, the Netherlands, Japan, Denmark and Germany.

The eight nano-satellites are really test beds meant for pushing the frontiers of satellite technology towards making affordable satellites.

They use basic off-the-shelf electronics and have short mission lives of a year or two at most.

The total weight of these nano-satellites on this record-breaking Indian mission was about 50kg.

Big challenge

India's next big challenge is the launch of Chandrayaan-1 (Moon Craft), the country's maiden shot at the Moon to be launched later this year using the PSLV.

A $100m mission, it is meant to map the Moon's surface in detail like never before and will undertake the most intense search for water on our nearest neighbour.

Cartosat 2A satellite during prelaunch tests
A mapping satellite was also put into orbit

This is first multi-continent mission in several decades, and the tables have been turned.

Countries like the US, UK and Sweden are being given literally a free ride to the Moon as India is charging them nothing for taking their instruments there.

A recent Japanese and Chinese mission carried only instruments from their own countries.

India's mark on space-faring is now indelible, with a mission for robotic landing on the Moon already scheduled for 2012 and space crafts to Mars, an asteroid and the Sun already being planned.

The Indian space agency is already looking at sending an Indian up on an Indian rocket from Indian soil within the next few years.

As Dr G Madhavan Nair, chairman of Isro put it to me: "Twenty years from now, when space travel is likely to become mundane like airline travel today, we don't want to be buying travel tickets on other people's space vehicles."

The author is an award winning science journalist and photographer. He is a correspondent for Science magazine and science editor for New Delhi Television. The views expressed here are his own.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7374714.stm

Found this nice article so thought of sharing. I was wondering about the profits involved in this mission. As this article states ISRO has earned only $500,000 from this mission. This is so less amount of money in my opinion. Just compare it with space missions of other countries like NASA and European space agency, they make profits of millions of dollars in each mission.

I don't mean to sound dense here, but how exactly do they make profit from launching satellites?

Well, I don't know the exact details either , I am assuming, lets' say the cost of making a satellite launcher is $1 million, the company can charge $10 million for launching a satellite. So, a space organization ends up making $9 mil.

For example, the price to satellite makers to launch their newest generation of satellites (7 Tonnes) is $120 million. Ariane (the european space agency) charges them $120 mil per launch. I don't know how much it takes for Ariane to make a launcher, but I'm guessing most of the $120 mil price tag is associated with R&D for creating the new space launcher. Once GSLV MK3 is built, India can compete in heavy satellite launching business, but I am not sure if it can launch 7 tonne satellites though(GSLV MK3 can launch 6 tonnes from what I know).

I meant who exactly is the one paying the space agency for a satellite launch? I assume it would be some corporation which wants to launch a satellite to communicate with its products?