Three women to supervise GSAT-12

Three ISRO women are diligently helping their 'baby' take its first steps in a sprawling antenna 'farm' amid village fields 200 km west of Bangalore, At its Master Control Facility (MCF) here, blinking screens show the status of GSAT-12, the latest communication satellite of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). Supervising each move are three women, products of home campus, trained by Isro.

Project director T. K. Anuradha, mission director Pramodha Hegde and operations director Anuradha Prakasham, are the three women at the helm of affairs. After weeks of tests, the deployed antenna will link remote villages and hamlets to their resource centers, tele-medicine outlets and students who take lessons from far-away city campuses.

"The feeling is like delivering a baby," a beaming T. K. Anuradha, an electronics engineer from University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering, Bangalore, said. Last Friday from Sriharikota the PSLV-C17 launched the satellite onto a highly elliptical orbit stretching 284 km to 21,000 km from the earth.

The job of taking it to the intended orbit is supervised by Pramodha Hegde, an electronics engineer who studied at B. V. Bhoomaraddi College of Engineering and Technology in Hubli, Karnataka. "The toughest of the five orbit raising manoeuvres was the first. At the nearest point to earth, the satellite moves the fastest as per Kepler's Law, leaving a narrow window of time to fire the motors, optimising fuel use," she said.

Anuradha Prakasham ensures that the trio plays in tune keeping to the beat. "Different injection operations went precisely as planned," said Prakasha, a postgraduate in physics from Cochin University of Science and Technology.

PSLV-C17 Successfully Launches GSAT-12 Satellite

ISRO's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle proves its mettle again. PSLV-C17, in its 19th flight, successfully launches India's communication satellite GSAT-12 from the Second Launch Pad of Satish Dhawan Space Centre- SHAR, Sriharikota, India. PSLV-C17 measuring 44.5 m height, with a lift off weight of 320 tonnes has four stages of solid and liquid propulsion systems alternately. In its XL Version, PSLV-XL uses six extended solid strap-on motors wherein each strap-on carries 12 tonnes of solid propellant. This is a second time such a configuration is being flown, earlier one being the PSLV-C11/Chandrayaan-I mission.

Salient feature of PSLV-C17/GSAT-12 Mission:

·         For the first time, use of indigenously designed and developed On-Board computer (OBC) with Vikram 1601 processor in both primary and redundant chains of the vehicle. The OBC performs the functions of Navigation, Guidance and Control processing for the vehicle.

·         Use of extended solid strap-on configuration

·         Satellite injection in elliptical transfer orbit sub-Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO)

·         Five burn strategy (2 perigee burn and 3 apogee burn) for placing the GSAT-12 satellite from its sub-GTO to Geostationary Orbit

ISRO using most powerful PSLV to launch GSAT-12

ISRO-Indian Space Research Organization is using the most powerful configuration of its rocket PSLV to launch a communication satellite GSAT-12 from Sriharikota on July 15^th 2011 costs nearly Rs 200 crore.

 It's only for the second time ever that a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle is being used to loft a communication satellite, the first one being Kalpana-1 in 2002. Bangalore-headquartered ISRO opted for this step as there is a large unfulfilled and pressing demand for communication transponders.

Communication satellites are launched on board GSLV or ISRO goes in procured launches overseas.

ISRO Chairman K Radhakrishnan said: "We wanted to create (transponder) capacity at the earliest. That's why we used the PSLV for the purpose (of launching a communication satellite), and achieve whatever is possible...best possible by a PSLV with XL configuration. That's the most powerful configuration,"

The GSAT-12 is a "fast-track" satellite with a mass of 1410 kg, has 12 Extended C-band transponders. It is slated to be injected into space by PSLV-C17 after the launch from Sriharikota spaceport slated between 16.48 hours and 17.08 hours on July 15. Similar PSLV, with extended strap-ons, was used for India's Chandrayaan-1 mission.