All set for PSLV C-15 launch on Monday morning

PSLV-C15 on launch pad.

All is set for the launch of India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle PSLV C-15, which will be carrying five payloads, including the 694 kg Cartosat-2B, an advanced remote sensing satellite, from the Sriharikota spaceport tomorrow morning.

Officials of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) told NetIndian over the telephone that the nearly 51-hour countdown for the 17th flight of PSLV, which began at 0652 hours yesterday, was progressing smoothly today.

The launch is scheduled for 0922 hours on Monday from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) at Sriharikota in Nellore district of Andhra Pradesh, about 100 km north of Chennai, he said.

"The countdown is progressing well," the official said, adding preparations for the launch were going on in full swing.

PSLV C-15 will place India's Cartosat-2B and four auxiliary payloads in a 630 km polar Sun Synchronous Orbit (SSO).

These include the 116 kg Alsat-2A, a small remote sensing satellite from Algeria, one nano satellite (6.2 kg) from the University of Toronto, Canada and another (1 kg) from the University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland and a pico (very small) satellite, Studsat, weighing less than one kg, built jointly by a consortium of seven engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.

According to official sources, PSLV was initially designed for launching 900 kg Indian Remote Sensing Satellites into a 900 km polar SSO. Since its first launch in 1993, the PSLV has been successively improved to attain its present capability of launching 1750 kg into a 630 km polar SSO.

They said the major changes made in PSLV since its first launch include increase in the propellant loading of the first stage solid propellant motor as well as the strap-ons and in the second and fourth liquid propellant stages, improvement in the performance of the third stage motor by optimising motor case and enhanced propellant loading and employing a carbon composite payload adopter.

The PSLV has also beem made a more versatile vehicle for launching multiple satellies in polar SSOs as well as for launching satellites into Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO) and Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

With 15 consecutive successful launches, the PSLV has emerged as a workhorse launch vehicle of ISRO and is offered for launching satellites of other space agencies also.

Besides launching 17 Indian satellites so far, PSLV has launched 22 foreign satellites as well between 1994 and 2009.

The sources said that, for the PSLV-C15 mission, the "core alone" version of PSLV has been chosen, based on the weight of the payloads and the orbit in which they are to be placed.

The 44-metre tall core alone version weights 230 tonnes at lift-off. Six solid strap-on motors, clustered around the first stage of PSLV "standard version" to enhance its thrust, are absent in the core alone version. This will be the sixth flight of the core alone version of the PSLV.

Cartosat-2B, built by ISRO, is India's 17th remote sensing satellite. It is mainly intended to augment remote sensing data serices to the users of multiple spot scene imagery with 0.8 metre spatial resolution and 9.6 km swath in the panchromatic band.

The sources said Cartosat-2B carries a panchromaic camera similar to that of its two predecessors - Cartosat 2 and Cartosat 2A. It also carries a solid state recorder with a capacity of 64 giga bits to store the images taken by its camera which can be read out later to the ground stations.

They said the imagery sent by the satellite would be useful for village level/cadastral level resources assessment and mapping, detailed urban and infrastructure planning and development, transportation system planning, preparation of large-scale cartographic maps, preparation of micro watershed development plans and monitoring of developmental works at village/cadastral level.

Besides, the imagery can also be used for the preparation of detailed forest maps, tree volume estimation, crop inventory, town/village settlement mapping, canal alignment, rural connectivity assessment, coastal landform/landuse and coral/mangrove mapping and monitoring of mining activities, the sources added.

Monday's launch will be the first mission for ISRO after the failure of the third developmental flight of the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV-D3) on April 15 this year. The flight, from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota, was primarily aimed at flight-testing the indigenously developed Cryogenic Upper Stage (CUS), but it could not accomplish the mission objectives.

NNN