Sriharikota, September 23
The 960-kg Indian remote sensing satellite Oceansat-2 and six European nano satellites launched by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) blasted off into the sky from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre here near the Bay of Bengal coast.
In a colourful launch, the satellite, shedding golden yellow fire, rose from behind the thick green woods, disappeared for a brief moment behind the silver white clouds and soared into the blue sky at 11.51 am on a bright sunny day.
Vice-President Hamid Ansari was among those who witnessed the "perfect, textbook launch", as the scientists applauded every step of the flight events with joy.
The PSLV-C14 lifted off from the first launch pad here with the ignition of the first stage. The flight events included the separation of the first stage, ignition of the second stage and separation of the payload at about 125 kilometre altitude after the vehicle had cleared the dense atmosphere.
Oceansat-2 was the first satellite to be placed into the orbit at 1081 seconds after lift-off at an altitude of 728 kilometres. About 45 seconds later, four of the six nano satellites were separated in sequence.
With this the Polar Satellite Launching Vehicle (PSLV) completed its sixteenth launch, about 16 years after it launched the first satellite in September 21, 1993. While the first launch was a failure, the other launches were successful.
The state-of-the-art Oceansat-2, shaped like a cuboid with two solar panels projecting from its sides, carries three payloads. This will be a major step in enhancing the country's oceanography study, which would be helpful for predicting weather from deciphering the sea winds and surface temperature, which will be monitored by the new satellite. Oceansat-2 will be just an orbit replacement of Oceansat-1, which took off from the same launch pad on May 26, 1999.
The new satellite with advanced features and capabilities will take over the job of identifying potential fishing zones, assisting in coastal studies and understanding surface temperature and winds. The new one can look at surface winds and temperature, unlike the earlier one which can only observe the colour of the ocean.
The satellite would highlight pools of fishes, help to calculate the amount of carbon dioxide in the sea which would be helpful in studying environment pollution and global warming.
The four cubesats, weighing one kg each, carried by Oceansat-2, are from Ecole Polytechnique
Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, Technical University of Berlin and University of Wurtzburg
and Istanbul University.
The two other rubinsats weighing 8 kg each are from Luxembourg and Germany. The auxiliary payloads are educational satellites from European Universities and are intended to test new technologies.
During many of its missions, the PSLV has launched multiple satellites into orbit with the maximum being ten during PSLV-C9 mission in April 2008. Of the 39 satellites launched by PSLV, 17 had been Indian and the rest of the satellites were from abroad.
Attributing the success of the launch to the team work of ISRO scientists, its chairman Madhavan Nair described the launch as “successful and precise”.
He said the frequency of ISRO’s launches had increased and it was planning another launch this year itself. He stressed that this launch was cost effective like the previous launches. Declining to comment on reports that images from Chandrayaan I had found traces of water on the moon, he said anything could be said only after the review of the mission at the end of this week.
