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India to launch 104 satellites in record mission

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https://phys.org/news/2017-02-india-satellites-mission.html


Nice to see such news items :)
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India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle would be carrying a 714 kilogram main satellite for earth observation and 103 smaller "nano satellites" which would weigh a combined 664 kilograms


India hopes to make history by launching a record 104 satellites from a single rocket Wednesday as its famously frugal space agency looks to zoom ahead in the commercial space race.

The rocket is set to blast off from the southern spaceport of Sriharikota, India's Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said in a statement on Tuesday.

The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle would be carrying a 714 kilogram main satellite for earth observation and 103 smaller "nano satellites" which would weigh a combined 664 kilograms.

Nearly all of the nano satellites are from other countries, including Israel, Kazakhstan, The Netherlands, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates and 96 from United States, said the state-run ISRO.

If successful, India will set a world record as the first country to launch the most satellites in one go, surpassing Russia which launched 39 satellites in a single mission in June 2014.

The business of putting commercial satellites into space for a fee is growing as phone, Internet and other companies, as well as countries, seek greater and more high-tech communications.
India is competing with other international players for a greater share of that launch market, and is known for its low-cost space programme.
Last June, India set a national record after it successfully launched a rocket carrying 20 satellites, including 13 from the US.
It sent an unmanned rocket to orbit Mars in 2013 at a cost of just $73 million, compared with NASA's Maven Mars mission which had a $671 million price tag.

ISRO is also mulling the idea of missions to Jupiter and Venus.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has often hailed India's budget space technology, quipping in 2014 that a rocket that launched four foreign satellites into orbit had cost less to make than Hollywood film "Gravity".
 
[h=1]‘They were small satellites’ – how prejudiced foreign media tried to deny India her success[/h]
Sometimes all it takes is one cartoon. In September of 2014, the New York Times, which is often pummelled by the President of USA Donald Trump, and is known for its anti-India bent, had published the following cartoon:

The racist cartoon showing India in poor light had been published just after India successfully put the Mangalyaan robotic probe into the orbit around Mars. The total cost of the mission was put at 4.5 bn rupees, making it one of the cheapest interplanetary space missions ever. Only the US, Russia and Europe (European Space Agency) had previously sent missions to Mars, and India succeeded in its first attempt – an achievement that eluded even the Americans and the Soviets.
Eventually New York Times had to apologise for their cartoon after public outrage.

Cut to 2017 and this time the New York Times (NYT) was joined by Financial Times (FT) in subtly underplaying yet another astounding feat by India:
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Instead of lauding India’s achievements, NYT and FT chose to snidely point out that many of the satellites were in fact of smaller size. If indeed it was so easy to launch such smaller satellites, we wonder why an overwhelming majority of such satellites belonged to advanced nations such as USA which can easily send them in to orbit. The fact that international companies chose ISRO, shows that ISRO had what the market needed: reliability, technical expertise, at a fraction of the cost.
In fact, the real challenge in carrying so many satellites is not their weight, but the difficulty in launching so many of them in different orbits, without any of them crashing into each other.

Dr. K. Sivan, Director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram, had explained the process and the challenges involved earlier this year:

“The satellites will be separated from the launch vehicle in different directions. The separation angle and time of separation will be such that one satellite will not collide with another. The satellite that gets launched first will move at a relatively faster velocity than the next satellite that is launched. Due to different relative velocities, the distance between the satellites will increase continuously but the orbit will be the same. When the vehicle reaches the orbital condition, we will wait for the disturbances to die down before the preparation for separation begins.”

An error of even one degree difference in separation angle combined with relative velocity can cause a collision and hence such a task of simultaneously launching over a 100 satellites requires a high degree of skill. NYT and FT could have learned this if they had talked to an actual scientist, but instead FT chose to quote Sonia Gandhi’s pet economist Jean Dreze, from the time he criticised India’s Mangalyaan mission, as “part of Indian elite’s delusional quest for superpower status”. FT also chose to juxtapose the spending on our space program against poverty alleviation measures.

The attitudes of NYT and FT’s reporting showed that they still couldn’t come to terms with the fact that a seemingly third world nation had galloped ahead in the space race, or at least one leg of the race. Has NYT or FT ever questioned USA’s exorbitant expenditures of various sectors even when an estimated 43.1 million US citizens (13.5% of the total population) live in poverty?

Or perhaps is it a growing worry that India is on the cusp of developing a name for itself in the International market for having a robust, technologically advanced satellite launching system, which also enjoys a huge cost advantage. The global market for nano and micro-satellites, is set to grow close to $3 billion in the next three years. ISRO sources point out that some 3,000 satellites will be ready for launch in the next 10 years for navigation, maritime, surveillance and other space-based applications.

ISRO has fast made a name for itself for its low cost services, which are attracting a lot of foreign customers as new private players like SpaceX are yet to improve their cost effectiveness. For a satellite launch, SpaceX can charge around USD 60 million, while ISRO charged an average of USD 3 million per satellite between 2013 and 2015. The forex revenue for ISRO’s commercial arm, Antrix Corporation, went up 204.9 percent in 2015.

While NYT and FT may mock nano-satellites, Prakash Chandra, a science writer, rightly mentions here that smaller sized satellites are the future:

Having a large number of small satellites instead of a few heavy ones makes sense as they could cover the same piece of ground more frequently — say, every 15 minutes — for collecting imagery. This could spell a revolution in the way satellites are used — whether it is helping fishermen identify catches, keeping track of crops, or detecting natural disasters like floods and earthquakes. Similarly, increasing miniaturisation in electronics makes redundant the use of heavy satellites for telecommunications and remote sensing. Smaller satellites deliver better coverage at a fraction of the cost.

He argues that this is exactly where India could make a killing since as satellites become smaller and less expensive to build, launch vehicles need to be correspondingly cheaper so that the number and rate of launches could be higher to keep launch costs down.
A more mature international media would have realised the significance of this launch and allowed India to bask in the glory of the PSLV, but petty minded publications like NYT and FT have exposed themselves, while trying to show India down. It started with a Cartoon, India has replied with a Cartosat, and the game is still on!

Source: http://www.opindia.com/2017/02/smal...reign-media-tried-to-deny-india-isro-success/
 
[h=1]ISRO’s Record Success Perfectly Embodies Gandhian Principles[/h]Excerpts:

Whenever India achieves a scientific feat that has a global impact, the characteristic reaction of the West is to remind India of its large-scale poverty. Here, it should be recalled that the Indian space programme is perhaps the largest people-oriented one in the world. This time even China’s Marxist regime has joined this chorus, reminding India that it still lags behind China, and that “as a hierarchical society, India has both world-class elite and a largest number of poor people”. It is interesting how the Marxist response to India’s technological advancement closely imitates the colonialist mindset of the West.

There are other reasons, too, for this kind of reaction by the Chinese. ISRO’s ambitious plans with respect to the international satellite launch market means an emerging competition with China. The larger neighbour has, over the years, developed its rocket technology ruthlessly. But often its ‘Long March’ series of rockets have failed, exploding over towns and villages and resulting in massive loss of human life. With no accountability to its citizens and a large slave labour at its command, the Marxist regime has emerged as a tough competitor to ISRO, which happens to be slower on the development front on account of all the hurdles it faces as a scientific institution in a democracy.

On 19 September 2015, China launched the Long March 6 with a launch capacity of 1,500kg into the low Earth orbit (LEO). The same year India's PSLV was launched successfully for the thirty-first time with a payload capacity of 3,700kg into the LEO. Long March 7, which performed successfully in 2016 and was expected to take up 70 per cent of all launches, can take a payload of 13,500kg into LEO and a payload of 5,500kg into the Sun-synchronous orbit. And then there are its launch vehicles, which China says are eco-friendly, reliable and safe. If, purely in terms of payload capacity, the Chinese launch vehicles are monstrous, the development of small and nano satellites, on the other hand, can tilt the market in India’s favour.

Nano satellites, usually weighing from one to 10 kilogram, can be used for a variety of purposes. One of the 104 satellites ISRO launched yesterday (15 February) belongs to Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. According to The Times of Israel, the satellite, “a little larger than a milk carton”, is interestingly the first Israeli nano satellite which will also allow “for the first time any Israeli university to have access to data from an Israeli nanosatellite for research purposes”. Apart from the Israeli satellite and one by the United Arab Emirates, most of the satellites are from the US. ISRO also has three satellites of its own as part of the mission, one weighing 730kg and the other two weighing 19kg each. The rest of the 600kg capacity has been shared by 101 satellites, allowing ISRO to recover half of the cost of the launch.

Clearly, this is a significant development for India, especially in terms of expanding the satellite launch market. India, with its soft and digital skills, can add great value to its launch vehicle services while keeping intact its unique selling point – reliability with cost-effectiveness. Come to think of it, these are the values Mahatma Gandhi would have cherished in a technology. ISRO’s success, therefore, appropriately reflects the Gandhian ideals.


Source: https://swarajyamag.com/science/isros-record-success-perfectly-embodies-gandhian-principles
 
[h=1]8 Hardworking ISRO Women Scientists Who Are Breaking The Space Ceilings With Their Work[/h]
Behind every successful man, there is a woman.

Let’s just tweak it a little bit.

“Behind every successful space mission in India, there are a thousand woman scientists.”


India has successfully launched satellites into space, put an orbiter around the Moon and Mars. That too with a frugality even the developed nations admire.

But behind the scenes, away from the public eye, quiet, unassuming and positively brilliant women spearhead many important missions of the Indian Space Research Organisation. These women have not only broken the glass ceilings but have not even thought of the sky as their limit – quite literally.

They are passionate, strong and independent women of science that look like our neighborhood aunties, but pack a scientific punch that would impress the likes of Tony Stark and Elon Musk. Today, let’s take a look at the women in ISRO.
[h=4]1. Ritu Karidhal, mother of two worked on most weekends, brainstorming with ISRO engineers[/h]To Read more click here
 
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