The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully launched their GSLV-F15 carrying the NVS-02 on 6:23 AM at Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, marking ISRO’s 100th rocket mission. The mission is also the first for the space agency’s Chairman V Narayanan, who assumed office recently. It is ISRO’s maiden venture this year.
The satellite was “precisely injected into the required (GTO) orbit. This mission is the 100th launch which is a very significant milestone,” Mr Narayanan said in his address post the successful launch.
“In this mission, the data has come; all vehicle systems are normal,” he added.
The first big rocket to liftoff from Sriharikota was the Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV) on August 10, 1979, and now nearly 46 years later the Department of Space has hit a century. Till now all big rocket launches at Sriharikota have been by the Indian government.
Earlier on Tuesday, S. Unnikrishnan Nair, Director of India’s main rocket lab the Vikram Sarabhai Space Center, in Thiruvananthapuram said “It is as robust as previous one. Like any other launch. We make every launch robust to the best of our ability. It will be successful.”
This rocket was once dubbed as the ‘naughty boy’ of ISRO since it gave the Indian space agency the worst time of all its menagerie of rockets. Since out of 16 launches so far there have been 6 failures for this rocket, which is a huge 37% failure rate. In comparison India’s latest the Bahuballi rocket the Launch Vehicle Mark -3 has a one hundred percent success rate.
It is also a rocket from the same family where India showed its innate skill of mastering the making of cryogenic engines, a technology the country took two decades to master after the technology transfer of the same was denied to India, by Russia under pressure from USA.
ISRO states GSLV-F15 is the 17th flight of India’s Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) and 11th flight with indigenous cryogenic stage. It is the 8th operational flight of GSLV with an indigenous cryogenic stage and 100th Launch from the India’s Spaceport Sriharikota. GSLV-F15 payload fairing is a metallic version with a diameter of 3.4 meters.
The GSLV-F15 with indigenous Cryogenic stage will place NVS-02 satellite into a Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit & the launch will take place from the Second Launch Pad (SLP) at Satish Dhawan Space Centre.
Navigation with Indian Constellation (NavIC) is India’s independent regional navigation satellite system designed to provide accurate Position, Velocity and Timing (PVT) service to users in India as well as to region extending about 1500 km beyond Indian land mass.
NavIC will provide two types of services, namely, Standard Positioning Service (SPS) and Restricted Service (RS). NavIC’s SPS provides a position accuracy of better than 20 meters and timing accuracy better than 40 nano seconds over the service area.
NavIC has given India its own share of challenges, since it was born out of the very bad experience the country had after the 1999 skirmish with Pakistan at Kargil, in that conflict India was denied access to high quality Global Positioning System (GPS) data and the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee promised to make a swadeshi version of the GPS for India’s strategic community.
Now on this hundredth launch ISRO hopes that the early challenges posed by the navigation satellites and the rocket are a thing of the past and it hopes to hit the hundredth mark in style.