India’s workhorse PSLV was launched on Monday morning to inject eight different satellites, including the country’s weather satellite SCATSAT-1 and five from other nations, into two different orbits.
Talking about the same, ISRO said that it achieved “flawless success in its first operational multi orbital separation,” and that the mission was declared a success.
The Quint was live from India Institute of Technology (IIT), Mumbai, which also had a satellite of its own launched on the PSLV.
This launch is said to be ISRO’s longest mission, spread over two hours and 15 minutes.
The PSLV-C35, which launched from the First Launch Pad of Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR, Sriharikota at 9:12 am on Monday, carried the 371 kg SCATSAT-1 along with seven other satellites, including from the US and Canada.
The total weight of all the eight satellites onboard PSLV-C35 was about 675 kg, ISRO said.
While SCATSAT-1 was released first into a 730 km Polar Sunsynchronous Orbit (SSO) after about 17 minutes, the rest will be injected into a lower orbit of 689 km after around two hours.
There will be two re-ignitions of the launch vehicle for this purpose, ISRO said.
Besides SCATSAT-1, the others are PRATHAM and PISAT, two academic satellites from India, ALSAT-1B, ALSAT-2B and ALSAT-1N (all from Algeria) and Pathfinder-1 and NLS-19, from USA and Canada, respectively.
The 48-and-a-half-hour countdown for PSLV-C35/SCATSAT-1 Mission started at 8:42 am on Saturday.
This will be the 15th flight of PSLV in ‘XL’ configuration with the use of solid strap-on motors, it added.
The mission objectives of SCATSAT-1 are to help provide weather forecasting services to the user communities through the generation of wind vector products for weather forecasting, cyclone detection and tracking, ISRO said.
SCATSAT-1 is a continuity mission for scatterometer payload carried by the earlier Oceansat-2 satellite, ISRO added.
(With inputs from PTI)