New Delhi: The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will try to create, yet another, history in space by launching 104 satellites at one go using its workhorse PSLV-C37 next week.
Earlier, the Indian space agency had planned to launch 83 satellites in the last week of January. But the launch had been postponed to February with the addition of 20 more foreign satellites.
As we eagerly await to witness ISRO's much laudable task of launching record-breaking satellites in a single flight, here are a few things to know:
- ISRO's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C37) - a 320-tonne rocket - will launch all 104 satellites at one go around 9am into the sun-synchronous orbit, about 500km above the earth, on February 15, 2017, from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh.
- Of the total earth-observation 104 satellites - three are Indian, 88 are from the US and the remaining are from Israel, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.
- The three Indian satellites are Cartosat-2 series (weighing 650 kg as primary payload) and two nano-satellites called INS-IA and INS-1B (weighing 15 kg each). ISRO says the payloads will totally weigh around 1,500kg.
- If successful, ISRO will be the first space agency to launch such a large number of satellites, surpassing the 37 satellites launch record set in June 2014 by Russia and 29 satellites launched by NASA in 2013. Last year in June, ISRO’s PSLV set national record by launching 20 satellites in a single mission.
As of December 2016, ISRO's PSLV has made 39 launches, with 37 successfully reaching their planned orbits, one outright failure and one partial failure, yielding a success rate of 95% (or 97% including the partial failure).
Some notable payloads launched by PSLV include India's first lunar probe Chandrayaan-1, Mangalyaan (Mars orbiter) - India's first interplanetary mission,- Astrosat, which is country's first space observatory.
