India's First Dedicated Space Observatory-Updates

[Peter Griffin]

India's First Dedicated Space Observatory Ready to Soar

India's first space observatory is ready and will be launched into space on the morning of September 28

If successful, the Indian space agency will join a very select club, since only the USA, European Union and Japan have similar capabilities. China lacks a space observatory.

The PSLV will also carry a Canadian and an Indonesian small earth observing satellite as a piggyback payload. This will be the 31st flight of the workhorse PSLV rocket, which has had 30 consecutive successful flights till date.

It will be placed almost 650 kilometres above the surface of the Earth and is expected to have a mission life of 5-years.

 

[kasper95]

ISRO To Launch ASTROSAT On-
Board PSLV-C30 On Sept 28 At 10
AM
Discussion in 'Other Engineering Trades' started
by Ankita Katdare, Monday at 8:14 AM.
by Ankita Katdare , Sep 21, 2015 at 8:14 AM
ISRO has announced that the ASTROSAT it has
been building and assembling for a while now is
ready for launch. The space & research
organisation will be blasting off the astronomical
observation satellite from PSLV-C30 on
September 28th (Monday) at 10 am from Satish
Dhawan Space Centre, SHAR. Along with
Astrosat, ISRO is launching 6 other international
satellites (4 from the US, 1 from Indonesia and 1
from Canada) as well. It is important to note
here that Astrosat is India's first dedicated multi-
wavelength space observation satellite. Some are
even calling it India's Hubble - the US-European
joint space observatory that has been successful
in discovering new galaxies. ASTROSAT is the
fourth such satellite in space after Hubble,
Japan's Suzaku and Russia's Spektr R.
In May this year, ISRO had declared that
ASTROSAT had been fully assembled and ready
for launch. After launching on Sept 28th and
reaching its destination, this astronomical
satellite will conduct observations in the
Ultraviolet (UV), optical, low and high energy X-
ray wavebands simultaneously. Its orbit will be at
650 km altitude with orbital inclination of 8
degress circular near equatorial orbit. The
diameter of Astrosat’s optical mirror is around 30
cm, compared with 2.4 m in the case of Hubble.
ASTROSAT will make it possible to measure
magnetic fields of neuron stars, understand high
energy processes in binary & extragalactic
systems and even search for black hole sources
in the galaxy. ISRO scientists will use this
purpose driven observatory to monitor the X-Ray
sky for new transients, studies of the periodic
and non-periodic variability of X-Ray sources,
simultaneous multi-wavelength monitoring of
intensity variations in a broad range of cosmic
sources and for conducting sky surveys in hard
X-ray and UV bands.
The Astrosat will carry instruments of various
Indian research labs such as the Tata Institute
of Fundamental Research (TIFR), the Indian
Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), the Inter-
University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics
and the Raman Research Institute (RRI). In
addition, two payloads have sensors from the
Canadian Space Agency and the University of
Leicester, UK.
The five payloads are:
1. Twin 40-cm Ultraviolet Imaging Telescopes
(UVIT)
2. Three units of Large Area Xenon Proportional
Counters (LAXPC)
3. A Soft X-ray Telescope (SXT)
4. A Cadmium-Zinc-Telluride coded-mask imager
(CZTI)
5. A Scanning Sky Monitor (SSM)

 

[Levina]

will be launched into space on the morning of September 28

Best of luck ISRO!!!

 

[migflug]

Good going isro.best of luck

 

[Turingsage]

It is good to see India taking some steps in fundamental science. Science just for the sake of science has been the root on which the technology tree grows