ISRO’s rocket launch, planned for Wednesday early morning, will be significant on two counts. It will be the 100th launch of India’s spaceport Sriharikota, and the first under new ISRO chairman, V Narayanan. On January 13, he succeeded S Somanath.
The 99th launch from Sriharikota was on December 31, when the PSLV-C60 mission successfully placed two spacecraft in a circular orbit to conduct the Space Docking Experiment.
GSLV-F15, which will take place on Wednesday, will be India’s 17th flight of its Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) and its 11th flight with an indigenous cryogenic stage. It is also the 8th operational flight of GSLV with an indigenous Cryogenic stage. The GSLV-F15 payload fairing is a metallic version with a diameter of 3.4 m.
The GSLV-F15 with indigenous Cryogenic stage will place NVS-02 satellite into a Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit & the launch will take place from the Second Launch Pad (SLP) at Satish Dhawan Space Centre, SHAR.
NavIC navigation system
Navigation with Indian Constellation (NavIC) is India’s independent regional navigation satellite system designed to provide accurate Position, Velocity and Timing (PVT) service to users in India as well as to regions extending about 1,500 km beyond the Indian land mass.
NavIC will provide two types of services, namely, Standard Positioning Service (SPS) and Restricted Service (RS).
Sriharikota island, located 80 km north of Chennai, was chosen in 1969 for a satellite launching station. It became operational on October 9, 1971, when an RH-125 sounding rocket was launched. The first attempted launch of an orbital satellite, Rohini 1A, aboard a Satellite Launch Vehicle, took place on August 10, 1979, but due to a failure in thrust vectoring of the rocket’s second stage, the satellite’s orbit decayed on August 19, 1979.
The SHAR facility has two launch pads that have important launches, including India’s lunar orbiter Chandrayaan-1 and Mars orbiter Mangalyaan. Recently, the Union Cabinet approved the third launch pad at a cost of ₹3,984 crore.