The Indian space agency will Feb 25 put into orbit seven foreign
satellites including an Indo-French collaborative satellite SARAL and
thus earn much wanted revenue.
"The launch of the Polar Satellite
Launch Vehicle-C20 (PSLV-C20) is currently fixed for Feb 25 evening,"
sources in the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) told IANS.
"The
rocket will blast off from the Sriharikota rocket launch centre (around
80 km from Chennia) carrying seven satellites, totally weighing around
700 kg," a source in ISRO said.
According to ISRO, the rocket is
expected to escape the earth's gravitational force at around 6 p.m. and
inject the satellites in sun synchronous orbit (SSO) at around 785 km.
Officials told IANS that assembly of satellites began Thursday afternoon and is expected to be completed by Friday night.
After
mating the satellites with the rocket, a full system check - rocket and
satellites - will be carried out before fixing the heat shield, the
protective gear that safeguards the satellites against damages when the
rocket crosses the atmosphere.
The launch window will be open Feb
22-25. During the 59 hour countdown, the systems will be checked and the
rocket will be fueled.
Speaking about SARAL (Satellite for ARGOS
and ALTIKA), Indian officials said the French gave the two payloads -
ARGOS and ALTIKA) while ISRO provided satellite bus (satellite frame)
and built the satellite.
"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 official told IANS.
The
SARAL will carry an Altimeter (ALTIKA) for studying the sea surface
heights and ARGOS payload, which is a satellite based data collection
platform.
Interestingly, PSLV-C20 will sling into orbit 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).
According to CSA, the satellite NEOSSat 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.
The satellite will also be useful in tracking resident space objects including space debris.
On
the other hand Sapphire will look for resident space objects that
includes functioning satellites and space debris circling between 6,000
km and 40,000 km above the earth.
The other four satellites to be
carried by PSLV-C20 are BRITE and UniBRITE (both Austria), STRAND
(Britain) and AAUSAT (Denmark).