Hyderabad, India (CU)_ At 05.59 am on Monday, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) launched a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle carrying two smaller co-passenger satellites from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh. This was ISRO’s inaugural launch mission of 2022, for which a 25-hour countdown began a day before.
The city-headquartered ISRO took to Twitter to announce the news. The tweet read, “PSLV-C52/EOS-04 Mission: The countdown process of 25 hours and 30 minutes leading to the launch has commenced at 04:29 hours today”.
The launch vehicle is planned to place the 1,710 kg earth observation satellite EOS-04 into a sun-synchronous polar orbit of 529 kilometers. EOS-04 is a Radar Imaging Satellite that was developed to offer high-quality photographs in all weather circumstances for the benefit of agricultural, forestry, and plantation applications, as well as soil moisture, hydrology and flood mapping.
Among the two smaller co-passenger spacecraft is a student satellite known as INSPIREsat-1 developed by the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST) in collaboration with the University of Colorado’s Laboratory of Atmospheric and Space Physics. Additionally, NTU in Singapore and NCU in Taiwan also contributed to the project. Two scientific payloads aboard this spacecraft will enhance our knowledge of the ionosphere dynamics and coronal heating processes on the sun.
The other satellite is an Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) technology demonstration satellite known as INS-2TD, which serves as a precursor to the India-Bhutan Joint Satellite known as INS-2B. The satellite’s payload is a thermal imaging camera that enables it to analyze land surface temperature, water surface temperature of wetlands or lakes, vegetation delineation (crops and forest), and thermal inertia (day and night). This will be PSLV’s 54th flight and the 23rd mission with the PSLV-XL configuration of six PSOM-XLs (strap-on motors).
