Singapore's first satellite launched by Indian space agency

The Indian Space Research Organisation deployed three satellites, including Singapore’s first, into orbit marking the agency’s recovery from two consecutive launch failures.

 

The PSLV-C16 rocket took off from Sriharikota in southern India at 10:12 a.m. The payload included Singapore’s first orbiter X-Sat. The launch deployed India’s 18th remote-sensing satellite, K.

 

Radhakrishnan, the chairman of the space agency, said in a televised address.

 

India, competing with other Asian nations such as China, Japan, and South Korea, is aiming to tap the global satellite- launch industry. The country plans to develop a reusable launch vehicle to cut costs. The South Asian nation is also planning a US$2.5 billion ($3.1 billion) mission to the moon by 2015. The success comes after two of the agency’s rockets, used to put large satellites in orbit, failed in April and December.

 

The launch “is absolutely crucial for the agency in the light of two failures last year and to rebuild a certain level of confidence,” said B.N. Raghunandan, former chairman of the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science.

 

India’s Resourcesat-2 will help map the country’s forest cover and monitor natural resources, U. Sankar, honorary professor of economics at the Madras School of Economics said.

 

SHIP SURVEILLANCE

The remote-sensing satellite also carries an additional experimental payload from Canada for ship surveillance. A third orbiter, made by Indian and Russian students, will study the atmosphere.

 

The space agency is battling to rid itself of charges of corruption. Its commercial arm Antrix Corp. signed a US$300 million deal with Devas Multimedia Ltd. in 2003 to lease transponder capacity in two satellites.

 

A transponder is a communications component that receives a signal and resends it at a different frequency, allowing near- instantaneous transmission between distant points on the earth’s surface. They are used in television broadcasting. Antrix has denied any wrongdoing.

 

India’s main opposition, Bharatiya Janata Party, said the deal was undervalued, according to the Press Trust of India. The government canceled the pact on Feb. 17 and formed a parliamentary panel to probe the deal, according to the news agency.

 

India launched its first rocket in 1963 and its first satellite in 1975.