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India in Space: A Remarkable

Odyssey

The Dream and Realization of Space Flight

For thousands of years, humans have curiously gazed at
the night sky and dreamt of travelling to space and explore the
distant heavenly bodies there. But that long cherished dream
became a reality only after they developed large rockets capable
of carrying satellites and humans to space. After reaching space,
those rockets were powerful enough to make satellites, robotic
spacecraft or spacecraft carrying humans to either circle the
earth or proceed towards the other worlds of our solar system.
Besides satisfying the human urge to explore space, devices
launched into space by humans have made our lives here on
Earth easier and safer. Thus, benefits offered by space are truly
revolutionary.
Now, let us understand the term ‘space’. When we talk
of space research or space flight today, the word ‘space’ refers
to the region which is outside the Earth’s atmosphere. Today,
many scientists agree that space begins at an altitude of about
100km from the Earth’s surface. Thus, all heavenly bodies
including the sun, moon, planets, stars and galaxies are in space.
Artificial satellites revolve round the Earth in space. Humans
living in the huge International Space Station today are circling
the Earth in space.
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The Uniqueness of the Indian Space Programme

India is one of the few countries that have taken up the
challenge of exploring space and utilizing space for the benefits
of the common man. For this, the country has developed various
technologies which few other countries have done.
India’s achievements in space
today are the result of the far-
sightedness of Dr Vikram Sarabhai,
one of the greatest sons of India.
Sarabhai was a great dreamer
and showed the path to realize
those dreams. He had firm belief
in the power of space technology
to bring about rapid and overall
development of India.
Professor Satish Dhawan, who
succeeded Dr Sarabhai as the head
of the Indian space programme, made immense contributions
to the Indian space programme by assigning great importance
to developing and mastering space technologies through
indigenous efforts. He also laid emphasis on the involvement
of the Indian industry to meet the needs of the country’s space
programme. Professor U.R. Rao, Dr K. Kasturirangan, Dr G.
Madhavan Nair and Dr K. Radhakrishnan, who succeeded
Professor Dhawan, have made their own unique contributions
to the Indian space programme.

The Beginning
Though India today is considered as one of the prominent
countries conducting many space activities, the Indian space
programme began in a modest way with the formation of the
Indian National Committee on Space Research by the Government
of India in1962. The programme formally began on 21 November
1963 with the launch of a 28-feet long American ‘Nike- Apache’
Sounding Rocket from Thumba, near Thiruvananthapuram.
It carried a small French payload (scientific instrument)
 India in Space: A Remarkable Odyssey 167

to study the winds in the

upper atmosphere. Sounding
rockets are small research
rockets that carry instruments
to study upper atmosphere
and space. They cannot
launch satellites.
Nearly 50 years later,
on 9 September 2012, India
celebrated its 100th space
mission. That historic mission
was performed by India’s
Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle
(PSLV-C21) which launched
a French and a Japanese
satellite, together weighing
750 kg very accurately into
the required orbit. This
shows as to how far India
has travelled in space and
has attained mastery over
space technology.
During the 1960s, India
conducted space research
mostly through sounding
rockets. But the country
also established a ground
station to conduct various
useful experiments using
communication satellites.

India’s Space Capabilities

Indian Space Research Organization, which is widely
known as ISRO, is the agency which implements the country’s
space programme on behalf of India’s Department of Space.
ISRO came into existence in 1969, the same year when humans
set foot on the moon for the first time.
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Various centres of ISRO are now spread all over India.

They include Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) situated
in Thiruvananthapuram, which designs huge rockets capable
of launching large satellites. In the same city is the Liquid
Propulsion Systems Centre (LPSC) that develops liquid rocket
engines and the more efficient and highly complex cryogenic
rocket engines.
Bangalore can be called as the space city of India. It has
got many space-related facilities including the ISRO Satellite
Centre (ISAC), which builds Indian satellites. The famous
Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft that conclusively discovered water
on the moon was built here. Moreover, the ISRO headquarters
and the Department of Space, which steer the Indian space
programme, are in Bangalore. ISRO’s Space Applications Centre
at Ahmedabad develops payloads for satellites.
National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) is another
important centre of ISRO. It is situated in Hyderabad and
performs the important task of receiving the pictures sent by
India’s remote sensing satellites in the form of radio waves.
The island of Sriharikota in the Bay of Bengal has ISRO’s
Satish Dhawan Space Centre and it is the space port of India.
Sriharikota lies about 80 km to the North of Chennai and lies
in the Nellore district of Andhra Pradesh. This is the place
from where 38 Indian built rockets have lifted off (as on April
2013) and have travelled towards space. It also has facilities to
assemble huge satellite launch vehicles as well as launch and
track them.

Into the Satellite Era

In the 1970s, India took a giant leap into space with the
launch of its first satellite Aryabhata. Named after the famous
ancient Indian astronomer, the satellite weighed 360 kg at the
time of its launch.
Aryabhata looked like a large box with many faces
(polyhedron). The satellite’s entire body was covered with
solar cells that generated electricity when they were exposed
to sunlight. Aryabhata was built to understand the challenges
 India in Space: A Remarkable Odyssey 169

involved in building a sophisticated device like a satellite.

Nevertheless, it was a scientific satellite as it carried three
scientific instruments to study the sun, distant heavenly bodies
and the Earth’s ionosphere. On 19 April 1975, a Soviet Rocket
carried Aryabhata into a 600 km high orbit. Aryabhata laid a
firm foundation to India’s satellite programme. With this, Indian
scientists moved ahead and began building Bhaskara 1 satellite,
which was intended to conduct Earth observations.
Bhaskara 1 was also launched by a Soviet rocket into orbit
in June 1979. It carried a TV camera for taking the pictures of
Earth’s surface. Besides, it carried a microwave radiometer, an
instrument to study the Earth. A similar satellite, Bhaskara 2,
was launched in 1981 on another Soviet rocket. The experience
gained during the Bhaskara programme was the foundation
stone for the later Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) satellite
programme.
Geosynchronous orbit lies at a height of about 36,000
km from the surface of the Earth, which of course, is almost
one-tenth of the way to moon. A satellite circling the Earth at
that height takes 24 hours to go round the earth once. Since the
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Earth also takes 24 hours to spin around its own axis once, the
satellite’s speed is synchronized with the Earth’s spin, hence the
name ‘geosynchronous orbit’. A satellite in such an orbit placed
over the equator is called a geostationary satellite.
In the late 1970s and early 80s, ISRO scientists also built
the Rohini series of satellites and gained additional experience
in building satellites. Rohini satellites were launched by India’s
first indigenous launch vehicle SLV-3.

Satellite as a Catalyst of Development

In the early 1980s, the power of the artificial earth satellites
to bring about phenomenal growth in India’s television
broadcasting and telecommunication sectors was glaringly
demonstrated by a satellite called Indian National Satellite -1B
(INSAT-1B). It was the second satellite in the INSAT-1 series.
Because of the failure of its predecessor INSAT-1A, Indian space
scientists were very much concerned, but INSAT- 1B brought
in a major revolution in India’s telecommunications, television
broadcasting and weather forecasting sectors in a very short
and unthinkable time.
I N S A T - 1 B
facilitated the rapid
expansion of essential
telecommunication
facilities like telephone,
telegraph and fax
across the country.
Through INSAT-
1B, mountainous,
inaccessible and isolated
regions of the North
and Northeast India as
well as island territories
of Andamans and
Lakshadweep could be
accessed easily.
 India in Space: A Remarkable Odyssey 171

Enhanced Services from our INSATs

The indigenously built
INSAT-2A had one and a half
times the service capability
of the earlier INSAT-1
satellites and weighed
almost twice at launch!
Like INSAT-1 satellites, it
too carried transponders
for telecommunications,
TV broadcasting and an
instrument for weather
observation. Besides, it
carried another special
instrument capable of
sensing distress signals
sent by special transmitters
in vehicles and even held by
individuals in danger.
As time progressed, three more satellites were launched
in the INSAT-2 series. They also carried ‘mobile service
transponders’ to facilitate communication between vehicles
and stationary users.
Special mention has to be made about GSAT-3 or EDUSAT,
which was a satellite dedicated to the field of education. It
facilitated the provision of quality educational services to rural
students through ISRO’s tele-education programme. Today,
there are about 56,000 classrooms in the EDUSAT network.
Another such service provided by INSAT/GSAT
satellites today is the telemedicine service. ISRO’s telemedicine
programme links doctors at super specialty hospitals in urban
areas to patients at rural hospitals through audio/video facilities
via satellite. One more interesting aspect of GSAT series of
satellites is that GSAT-8 and 10, launched in 2011 and 2012,
respectively, carry a ‘GAGAN’ transponder that broadcasts
navigation signals. GAGAN programme boosts the quality,
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reliability and availability of navigation signals broadcast by

American GPS series of navigation satellites. In addition to
communication satellites, India has built another type of satellite
called the remote sensing satellites. In fact, India has emerged as
one of the world leaders in the field of remote sensing satellites.

Eyes in the Sky

So, what are these remote sensing satellites? What do they
do? How are they useful to the society?
To understand this, let us begin with the word ‘remote
sensing’. When we say remote sensing, it means that it is
a method of collecting information about an object or a
phenomenon without having any physical contact with it.
Satellites carrying very sensitive cameras or radars and circling
the Earth in space hundreds of kilometres high are known as
remote sensing satellites. They transmit the pictures to ground
 India in Space: A Remarkable Odyssey 173

stations through radio. Such pictures, taken in different colours

or in black and white, show a lot of details. Trained scientists
can manipulate and analyse those pictures in computers to
understand several facts, like estimating the net sown area,
underground water availability, mineral deposits through rock
colour, environment assessment, pollution levels, wasteland
development, and so on.

Quenching the Thirst for Knowledge

Communication satellites,
weather satellites and remote
sensing satellites are satellites that
make our life easy, interesting
and safe. In addition to this, ISRO
scientists have built scientific
satellites that quench the human
thirst for knowledge, especially to
understand our universe.
But the satellite or to be
more precise the spacecraft which
revealed the prowess of Indian
scientists to efficiently explore
space was Chandrayaan-1. Since
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Chandrayaan-1 went towards some other heavenly body instead

of permanently circling the Earth, it is appropriate to call it a
spacecraft rather than a satellite.
Chandrayaan-1 demonstrated many things including
India’s ability to do meaningful science at low cost, its ability to
assume leadership in a cooperative space venture and develop
the essential technology within stipulated time. Chandrayaan-1
made the outside world to look at India with enhanced respect
and galvanized student community within India. It became a
prominent milestone not only in the history of Indian space
programme, but in the history of India itself.
One of the main objectives of Chandrayaan-1 was to further
expand the knowledge about the moon, make more progress in
space technologies, especially by decreasing the various internal
‘organs’ of a satellite or a spacecraft and provide challenging
opportunities to India’s large younger generation of scientists
to conduct research about the moon.
Having proved India’s ability to successfully explore
another heavenly body, Chandrayaan-1 collected massive
 India in Space: A Remarkable Odyssey 175

amount of scientific data (information), including pictures.

Chandryaan-1 had detected water molecules on the moon. This
was a path-breaking discovery indeed!

Before Chandryaan-1 went to moon, scientists were not

certain about the presence of water on the moon. Thus, it was
India’s Chandrayaan-1 which made a major discovery about
the moon. Along with this, scientists were able to sense the
height and depth of various features on the lunar surface.
Chandrayaan-1 thus became a symbol of India’s success in
space.

Bringing Back from Space

Another remarkable achievement of ISRO is related to
bringing back an object from space safely. The experiment which
was performed in this regard was called Space Capsule Recovery
Experiment-1 (SRE-1). The 550 kg SRE-1 capsule carrying two
experiments was launched on 10 January 2007 in PSLV and the
following 12 days, it circled the Earth at about 600 km height.
Thus, the very first attempt of India to bring back a device which
it had launched into space earlier, was a great success.
176 Indian Contributions to Science

Launch of 20 satellites through a single rocket

An Example of Frugal Engineering

ISRO crossed a milestone on 22 June 2016 by launching
20 satellites through a single rocket. It crossed its own record
of launching 10 satellites in a single mission. ISRO is second
to Russian rocket launching a record of 37 satellites in a single
mission in 2004. In this major milestone mission, besides
the primary Cartosat-2 series satellite, the PSLV C-34 rocket
launched two satellites from Indian Universities (Sathyabhama
University, Chennai and College of Engineering, Pune) and 17
 India in Space: A Remarkable Odyssey 177

foreign satellites including one for a Google Company. The 725.5

kg Cartosat- 2 series of satellite will be for Earth observations
and its imagery would be useful for cartographic applications,
urban and rural applications, coastal land use and regulation
and utility management like road networking.
There are 35 Indian satellites in the orbit and about 70
satellites are needed in the next five years, besides the contracts
signed with foreign companies. Hence, ISRO will go for more
multiple launch missions than single mission.
Indian Space Programme is one of the important sources of
foreign revenue. ISRO’s commercial branch generated a revenue
of about Rs 1800 crore during the last fiscal year ,and a major
share of revenue was obtained by leasing out transponders.
During 2016–17 more multiple satellite launching will take
place from Sriharikota.
Indian Space Programme is attractive to foreign firms
since the mission has low budget in comparison with those of the
other countries. Engineering programme with minimum budget
providing maximum gain is called frugal engineering. Indian
Space Programme is the best example of frugal engineering.
The success of Chandrayaan mission initiated the quest
for Mars through the Mars Orbitor Mission or the Mangalyaan.
India became the only country to orbit Mars in the first attempt.
The success of Mangalyaan put India on the elite club of nations
to have achieved interplanetary missions.
The successful testing of air-breather propulsion system
and the scramjet rocket engine has put India among the space
technology giants of the globe. With Antrix Corporation bagging
deals of foreign satellite launches, it is certain that in future ISRO
is set to rise as the most sought after governmental space agency.