MUMBAI: Around two hours  after lift-off and after placing India’s weather satellite ScatSat1 in a polar sun synchronous orbit at 720 km, the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO’s) PSLV C35 rocket fired once again. Following that maneuver, it placed another seven satellites in orbit at an altitude of 670 km.

The seven satellites included two from Indian educational institutions (PISAT and Pratham) and three commercial initiatives from Algeria (Alsat-1B, 2B and 1N) and one each from Canada (NLS-19) and the US (Pathfinder 1).

ISRO chairman AS Kiran Kumar called the Monday launch as a landmark day in its history. The reason: the PSLV C35 mission marked the first time that the space organization  had successfully fired the  polar satellite launch vehicle twice to place satellite in different orbital altitudes. And, it was also the longest PSLV mission tackled by ISRO. 

ScatSat-1 has a lifespan of five years and it is meant to give e weather forecasting services through the generation of wind vector products,  while the the 10 kg Pratham developed by  by IIT Bombay intends to estimate the total electron count with a resolution of 1km x 1km location grid. PISAT from the PES University will explore remote sensing applications. 

Algeria's ALSAT-1B is an earth observation satellite (103 kg), ALSAT-2B a remote sensing satellite (117 kg) and ALSAT-1N (7 kg) a technology demonstrator. Canada's NLS-19 is a technology demonstration micro satellite (8 kg) and Pathfinder-1 is a commercial high resolution imaging micro satellite (44 kg).

Kiran Kumar said that ISRO’s next launch is slated for 4 October which is the communication satellite GSAT-18. 

Congratulations poured into ISRO from all quarters right from Suresh Prabhu to M Venkaiah Naidu to the President Pranab Mukherjee to Shivraj Singh Chouhan to Nirmala Setharaman and finally from the prime minister Narendra Modi.

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