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First astrosat to be launched by Isro next year

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The Hindu : Sci-Tech : ASTROSAT all set to be launched next year: Madhavan Nair


India’s first science satellite ASTROSAT is all set to be launched next year, former chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation Dr. Madhavan Nair said here on Saturday.

One more satellite ‘Aditya’ to study Sun’s coronal mass ejection (CME) will be launched in two years while the science mission to planet Mars by 2013, Nair said addressing a galaxy of scientists from India and abroad and the student community at the Grand Finale function of Bhabha Centenary celebrations which concluded on Saturday.

The multi-wavelength astronomy mission ASTROSAT on an Indian remote sensing satellite-class satellite in a 650-km, near-equatorial orbit will be launched next year, he said adding it will be launched by the Indian launch vehicle PSLV from the Sriharikota launch pad. The expected operating life time of the satellite will be five years.

`Adiyta’ will be launched in next two years to study the properties of CMEs, which are gigantic bubbles of electrified gas that billow away from the Sun.

CME can carry as much as 10 billion tons of solar material and trigger spectacular geomagnetic storms if they hit Earth’s magnetosphere.

CMEs, which usually travel at speeds between 500 and 1500 km per second, take 2 or 3 days to cross the 150 million km divide separating the Sun and Earth.

About India’s Mars mission, Nair said various concepts about going to Mars and nearby objects are being looked into and it is at a conceptual stage right now.

“We have the capability and will be using geosynchronous satellite launch vehicle (GSLV) for launching the Mars mission,” he said.

“The ISRO has begun the preparations for sending a spacecraft to Mars and discussions are thrown out to find what are the things we have explore in Martian atmosphere,” he said.

Earlier this year Union Government sanctioned seed money of Rs. 10 crore for Mars project to carry out various studies on experiments to be conducted, route of the mission and other related details necessary to scale the new frontier.

About Chandraan II mission, he said “it is going to be one our flagship mission and is expected to be launched in 2013.Yesterday ISRO had conducted a review of the instrumentation required for the mission,” he said.

“The design for Chandrayaan-II is ready which includes an orbiter, lander and rover which will be used to study the surface of the moon in detail including the moon magma,” Mr. Nair said.

He also explained that last year, ISRO had sent to space a capsule which was recovered after keeping in orbit for 22 days. The Space Recovery Experiment (SRE) was seen as a technology demonstrator for future manned missions.

He also impressed upon the student community from various colleges that ISRO is also actively working on atmospheric science and developing a parallel local weather forecasting system which can predict weather in a specified locality before 72 hours.

ISRO is having a joint venture with France, the Megha-Tropiques Mission (MTM), to study the water cycle in the tropical atmosphere in the context of climate change, he added. It is a collaborative effort with the French Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales, he said.
 
Excellent news. ASTROSAT will be the first Indian satellite carrying UV and X-ray telescopes.

ASTROSAT will carry five astronomy payloads for simultaneous multi-band observations:

* Twin 40-cm Ultraviolet Imaging Telescopes (UVIT) covering Far-UV to optical bands

* Three units of Large Area Xenon Proportional Counters (LAXPC) covering medium energy X-rays from 3 to 80 keV with an effective area of 6000 sq.cm. at 10 keV

* A Soft X-ray Telescope (SXT) with conical foil mirrors and X-ray CCD detector, covering the energy range 0.3-8 keV. The effective area will be about 200 sq.cm. at 1 keV

* A Cadmium-Zinc-Telluride coded-mask imager (CZTI), covering hard X-rays from 10 to 150 keV, with about 10 deg field of view and 1000 sq.cm. effective area

* A Scanning Sky Monitor (SSM) consisting of three one-dimensional position-sensitive proportional counters with coded masks. The assembly will be placed on a rotating platform to scan the available sky once every six hours in order to locate transient X-ray sources.

ASTROSAT will be a proposal-driven general purpose observatory, with main scientific focus on:

* Simultaneous multi-wavelength monitoring of intensity variations in a broad range of cosmic sources
* Monitoring the X-ray sky for new transients
* Sky surveys in the hard X-ray and UV bands
* Broadband spectroscopic studies of X-ray binaries, AGN, SNRs, clusters of galaxies and stellar coronae
* Studies of periodic and non-periodic variability of X-ray sources

ASTROSAT-An Indian Multiwavelength Astronomy Satellite

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