ISRO Busy With 5 Launches In The Coming Months

ISRO Busy With 5 Launches In The Coming Months

ISRO is focusing to conduct 5 launches, which includes mission Chandrayaan-2, said K Sivan, ISRO chairperson. The mission projected from spaceport Sriharikota, in the first 6 months of 2018.

In the first six months of 2018, ISRO has scheduled tasks from spaceport Sri Harikota which includes GSLV–MkIII, Satellite GSAT-6A, PSLV and Chandrayaan-2.

ISRO, space agency headquartered in Bangalore has also entered into deal with multinational company, Arianespace for launching the communication satellite, GSAT-11 weighing 5.7 ton from the spaceport in Kourou town, which is located in French Guiana Atlantic Coast by ESA (Space Agency of Europe). It is expected to be launched by June 30, 2018.

At present, India has 45 satellites. The requirement is for a same quantity of spacecraft. ISRO has an objective to launch 15 to 18 satellites each year, but reaches only half of it.

Satellite GSAT-11 is the last heavyweight satellite, a non-native launcher will be used, but Dr Sivan does not want to jump to any conclusion.

The GSLV-MkIII’s subsequent developmental flight is programmed before June.

The space agency is working on development and designs of model rocket to lower the costs. However, these is just the initial phase, and small rocket plan still requires plan to be executed properly.

He said the work is in progress and it is a time taking process. The design, conceptualization, realization, model qualification, all these steps has to be carried out first.  The space team is working with small rocket for the initial phase.

There are benefits of working on such small rockets. As per ISRO team, it cuts down expenses and the time for launching small satellites would reduce considerably.

Small satellites are not required to linger for larger vehicles for their launching. There will be no waiting time. The space research team does not require bigger launch machines to position small satellites, one of the researchers said.