The Hindu Business Line : ‘10-in-1’ PSLV flight today

The national space agency is set to achieve a unique feat on Monday morning of delivering ten satellites into near-Earth orbit off a single launcher. Eight of them are tiny or ‘nano’ commercial satellites.

The main passenger abroad the launcher, PSLV-C9, is the indigenous Cartosat-2A. The 690-kg remote-sensing satellite will offer close views of objects less than 1 metre, from a height of 630 km.

Cartosat-2A, with a life of five years, is the third in the ‘carto’ or mapping series. Cartosat-1 (launched in May 2005) and Cartosat-2 (January 2007) are beaming pictures that are used by urban planning and infrastructure agencies.

“Cartosat-2A will form a pair with Cartosat-2, providing more frequent revisit” of a location, the ISRO said.

Sales of earth imageries from these Indian remote-sensing satellites form nearly a third of the Rs 500-600 crore revenue of Antrix Corporation, ISRO’s commercial arm. Six IRSs are now in service, beaming imageries to ISRO stations across the globe: IRS-1D, OCeasat-1, the experimental 1-m resolution satellite TES; Resoursat-1, Cartosat-1 and 2.

CLUSTER OF TINY SATS

On Monday, ISRO is also launching the 83-kg IMS-1 (Indian mini satellite) which will test new technologies and miniaturised sub-systems that will go into future space projects.

Some of the imageries will be offered to developing countries. The cost of ISRO’s remote sensing or other products is said to be 30-50 per cent lower than imageries from the US or European satellites.

The cluster launch is slated for 9.20 a.m. from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota.

For ISRO’s workhorse launcher PSLV, this will be the 13th flight and the third in the core-alone version minus the six strap-on motors in the first stage.

The eight nanosatellites are being launched under a commercial contract with Antrix. They weigh 3-16 kg each and 50 kg together.

Six of them form a cluster called NLS-4 and are developed by the University of Toronto and involve universities of Canada, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands. The other two are NLS-5 (University of Toronto) and RUBIN-8, built by Germany’s COSMOS International.

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