RESOURCE SATELLITE

It was a glorious day for the ISRO when the 8 th flight of its PSLV-C5 put Resource Satellite in its precise orbit of 821 Kms above the earth on Oct 17, 2003 . This was the 7 th straight success for PSLV. The PSLV-C5 success was all the more spectacular because the launch took place in Sriharikota in inclement weather when such missions are not normally attempted. Heavy rain began a few hours before the launch & persisted past the life-off time. But that did not affect the launch of PSLV-C5 because it is waterproof vehicle, built by Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram.

Resource Satellite is the 10 th spacecraft of ISRO in the IRS series. It is the heaviest earth observation spacecraft launched by ISRO, weighing 1360 Kg, so far. The whole world is looking at this satellite because of the kind of high-resolution imageries it would generate. It has the most sophisticated cameras on board to produce the imageries, which will be helpful in:

• Determining the health of crops;
• Locating ground water availability;
• Surveying whether the spread of lakes & ponds is shrinking;
• Assessing the severity of droughts;
• Real-time monitoring of floods;
• Mapping wastelands;
• Studying the destruction of forests;
• Detecting the death of coral reefs;

The Resource Satellite will have a life of 5 years.

India has the largest constellation of remote-sensing satellite in space today & they include:

IRS – 1C;
IRS – 1D;
IRS – P3;
IRS – P4(Ocean Satellite);
TES (Technical Experiment Satellite).

All these including Resource Satellite were built at ISRO Satellite Centre, Bangalore and their cameras fabricated at Space Application Centre, Ahmedabad.

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LAUNCH:

• The latest PSLV success confirmed that ISRO could confidently go ahead with its moon mission Chandrayan I, scheduled for 2008.
• The PSLV’s success also signaled that ISRO could go ahead with another challenging job – of building a Geo-synchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle GSLV Mark III.
• 7 successes in a row have proved the versatility of the PSLV. It can put Satellite of different classes in various orbits.

• It can deploy Satellites in low earth orbits at a height of 400 – 600 km above the earth. It can put Satellite weighing upto 1500 Kg in a polar orbit at a height of more than 800 kms.
• It can put Satellites in geo-synchronous transfer orbit at a height of 36,000 kms, as it did when it deployed the weather Satellite METSAT (later Kalpana -I) in Sept. 2002.

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