India to launch Italian satellite today
India to launch Italian satellite today
<%image(20070423-sat.jpg|151|245|null)%>{(A previous Indian rocket launch. Indian space scientists were counting down the final hours Monday before a home-built rocket launches an Italian satellite into space in the country’s first commercial space mission )}
Indian space scientists were counting down the final hours Monday before a home-built rocket launches an Italian satellite into space in the country’s first commercial space mission.
“The countdown, which involves a series of precisely timed operations, is going on,” a spokesman for the Bangalore-based Indian Space Research Organisation said. “The PSLV has been mated with its payload and the fully integrated vehicle is standing on the launchpad.”
The 15-storey-high rocket is being pumped with liquid propellant and undergoing pre-launch tests, said the spokesman.
It will launch the 352-kilogram (774-pound) Italian astronomical satellite Agile that will be used to gather information about the origins of the universe.
“The payload will be separated from the vehicle in its orbit 23 minutes after the takeoff,” the spokesman said.
The 48-hour countdown began on Saturday, setting the stage for a launch that India hopes will win it membership of an exclusive club of nations to successfully put their space programmes to commercial use.
India wants to compete with the United States, Russia, China, the Ukraine and the European Space Agency in offering commercial satellite launch services, a market worth up to 2.5 billion dollars a year.
Monday’s launch of the Agile satellite, which will be used to study astronomical events in the distant universe, will be a key test of the country’s commercial launch capabilities.
“The launch itself is a matter of minutes but years of work have gone into it,” said K.R. Sridhara Murthi, executive director of Antrix Corp., the marketing arm of the Indian department of space.
“We are confident about the mission considering the thoroughness with which preparations have been made,” he said, adding about 1,000 scientific and technical personnel had been involved in various pre-launch preparations.
India started its space programme in 1963, and has since developed and put its own satellites into space. It has also designed and built launch rockets to reduce its dependence on overseas space agencies but has only recently begun exploring commercial spinoffs.
It carried out the first successful launch of a domestic satellite, which weighed 35 kilogrammes, by a home-built rocket in 1980.
For Monday’s launch of the Italian satellite, ISRO is charging 11 million dollars, the Press Trust of India has reported. Space agency officials have confirmed the fee is close to that figure.
The PSLV that will carry the Italian payload into space has carried out nine successful launches since 1994 — including eight remote-sensing and one amateur radio satellite — and is known as the workhorse of the Indian space programme.
Capable of placing 1,500-kilogramme satellites into orbit, the rocket has been modified to launch the much smaller Agile, together with which it will carry a space module to test avionic systems like mission computers and navigation systems.