Seven satellites to be launched by ISRO on Feb 25

16 February, 2013

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will reportedly launch seven satellites into orbit on February 25. These seven satellites will also include much awaited Indo-French collaborative satellite SARAL (Satellite for ARGOS and ALTIKA), reported IANS.

The launch of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle-C20 (PSLV-C20) is currently fixed for the evening of February 25," sources in the ISRO told IANS. Indian officials speaking about SARAL said that the French gave the two payloads - ARGOS and ALTIKA while ISRO provided satellite bus or satellite frame and built the satellite and thus the part of the launch is in Indo-French collaboration.

The data generated by SARAL will be shared by France and India whereas the other five satellites would be launched on commercial basis," an ISRO officials added.

ALTIKA which is also called as Altimeter which will be a part of satellite will be used for studying the sea surface heights and ARGOS payload is a satellite based data collection platform.

The rocket will blast off from the Sriharikota rocket launch centre (around 80km from Chennai) carrying seven satellites, totally weighing around 700kg," a source in ISRO told zeenews.india.com.

As per reports the rocket which will be carrying these satellites will be launched around 6pm on the evening of 25th February and inject these satellites in SSO (Sun synchronous orbit) at around 785km.

It is also reported that PSLV-C20 will deploy two Canadian satellite NEOSSat (Near Earth Object Space Surveillance Satellite), the world's first space telescope designed by Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and Sapphire satellite built by MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) into an orbit which will detect and track asteroids and satellites circling the globe every 100 minutes and scanning space near the Sun to pin point otherwise almost invisible asteroids.

On the other hand Sapphire will look for resident space objects that includes functioning satellites and space debris circling between 6,000km and 40,000km above the earth.

The other four satellites to be carried by PSLV-C20 are BRITE and UniBRITE (both Austria), STRAND (Britain) and AAUSAT (Denmark).

All satellites will be assembled by Friday night and after completion of satellites full system check of both rocket and satellite before fixing a heat shield which is the final step of assembling complete launch. Heat shield which is a protective gear used to safeguard the rocket and satellites against the damages might happen after crossing the earth's protective atmosphere.

The launch clock will get started almost 59 hours before on 22nd of Feb and will continue till 25th evening. During these hours of countdown all final checks will be done and rocket will be fueled.