India puts weather satellite SCATSAT-1 into orbit

India successfully put into orbit its own weather satellite SCATSAT-1 in a copy book style.The mission life of the satellite is five years.

In the second phase of its mission, the rocket will launch seven other satellites – five foreign and two Indian – between 11.25 to 11.28 a.m., in a different orbit. And Exactly at 9.12 a.m., the PSLV rocket standing 44.4 metres tall and weighing 320 tonne tore into the morning skies with fierce orange flames at its tail.

17 minutes into the flight, the rocket’s main cargo, the 371 kg SCATSAT-1 – for ocean and weather related studies – was injected into a 730 km polar sun synchronous orbit.

Although SCATSAT-1 is a follow-on mission for Oceansat-2 improvements have been made in the satellite’s hardware configuration based on lessons learnt from Oceansat-2 instruments. It will provide wind vector data products for weather forecasting, cyclone detection and tracking services to the users.

These 8 satellites include five foreign satellites: 3 from Algeria , 2 from Canada & 1 from US & another 2 are from India

According to the ISRO, the two Algerian satellites Alsat-1B and Alsat-2B are remote sensing satellites while Alsat-1N is a technology demonstration nano satellite for Algerian students.

On the other hand, the US satellite Pathfinder-1 is a commercial high resolution imaging micro satellite while the Canadian NLS-19 satellite is la technology demonstration nano satellite for experimentation in helping to reduce space debris and for tracking commercial aircraft.

The IIT-B’s satellite Pratham’s mission objective is to estimate the total electron count with a resolution of 1km x 1km location grid while Pisat from PES University and its consortium is a nano satellite for remote sensing applications.