Indian space agency ISRO made history today by putting 20 satellites in orbits using its launch vehicle PSLV C–34 which was launched from Satish Dhawan space center in Sriharikota.
While putting the 20 satellites (which include 17 from foreign vendors) to orbit itself has set an in-house record, what’s more great is that the job was done 10 times cheaper than any other space agencies.
The launch was completed at 9.26 am and all of the separation stages were successfully finished exactly after 26 minutes from lift-off.
It is the first time for ISRO to launch large number of satellites to orbits at the same time. Previous record of ISRO was in June, 2008 when 10 satellites were put in orbits.
The world record for largest ever launch was held by Russia whose Dnepr rocket ferried 37 satellites to orbit in 2014.
PSLV C-34 vehicle which weighed 320 tonnes carried 17 small satellites of Indonesia, US, Canada, Germany and US and two satellites – Sathyabhamasat and Swayam – made by two Indian Universities.
The most important and heaviest among the 20 satellites was an earth observational spacecraft from India’s Cartosat-2 series. It weighs around 727.5 kg and will be deployed into orbit at a height of 505 km.
Image courtesy: ISRO
Of the 13 US-made small satellites that were launched today, one belongs to Terra Bella, a Google-owned company. The 110-kg Google satellite, called SkySat Gen- 2, is capable of taking sub-meter resolution images and high definition video.
The four other foreign satellites are LAPAN-A3 from Indonesia, BIROS from Germany, and M3MSat and GHDSat-D from Canada.
Until now, ISRO has launched 57 satellites for foreign vendors from about 20 countries since May 1999, earning about $100 million from these.
