New Delhi: India’s PSLV-C45 was successfully injected EMISAT and 28 international customer satellites into their designated orbits. The secret mission named Koutilya once again made the nation proud of its technological advancement.
The PSLV-C45 was lifted off at 09:27 Hrs (IST) on April 01, 2019 from the second launch pad of Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR, Sriharikota in its 47th flight. This flight marked the first mission of PSLV-QL, a new variant of PSLV with four strap-on motors.
About 17 minutes and 12 seconds after lift-off, EMISAT was successfully injected into intended sun-synchronous polar orbit of 748 km height.
After the separation of EMISAT, the vehicle’s fourth stage engines were restarted twice to place the 28 international customer satellites precisely into a sun-synchronous orbit of 504 km height. The last customer satellite was placed in its designated orbit 1 hour and 55 minutes after lift-off.
About 3 hours after lift-off, the fourth stage (PS4) of the vehicle was moved to a lower circular orbit of 485 km after two restarts to establish it as an orbital platform for carrying out experiments with its three payloads. The PS4 payloads are Automatic Identification System from ISRO, Automatic Packet Repeating System from AMSAT, India and Advanced Retarding Potential Analyzer for ionospheric studies from Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology.
According to Ratan Shrivastava, Advisor, Space Division, FICCI, “ The EMISAT has been developed for monitoring radar network by India. EMISAT is a small satellite weighing approximately 436 kgs and developed by DRDO (DLRL Hyderabad) under Project KAUTILYA.”
“It is an ELINT satellite based on IMS2 Bus (Indian Mini Satellite Bus series) which can have a maximum launch weight of 450Kgs with a payload no more than 200kgs. It shares the same Bus architecture as the HySIS satellite launched in November 2018. It is likely to be placed in an elliptical orbit in order to optimize the dwell time, for a required area under observation,” Shrivastava explains.
According to ISRO Chairman K Sivan, in this special mission, PSLV rocket with four strap-on motors will be used and this will be the first time for ISRO will be trying to orbit the rocket at three different altitudes.
The ELINT includes recordings and analysis of intercepted signals and helps create an RF signature of a radar which can, in turn, be used for locating and quickly identify the radar in subsequent encounters.
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