ISRO to create history by launching record 104 satellites next week
The PSLV-C36 at launch. Picture: ISRO
India will create history by launching a record 104 satellites, including 101 foreign ones, on February 15 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, an official said on Monday.
“We have tentatively decided to launch the satellites at one go around 9 a.m. into the sun-synchronous orbit, about 500 km above the earth,” the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) official said.
Of the total earth-observation satellites, three are Indian, 88 are from the U.S. and the remaining are from Israel, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.
“A 320-tonne rocket-Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C37) will launch all the satellites with a combined weight of 1,500 kg, including the 650 kg remote-sensing Cartosat-2 and two nano-satellites (IA and IB) weighing 15 kg each,” the official said.
Planet, an earth observation company formed in 2010 by former NASA scientists, will be sending the 88 cubesats, each weighing around 5 kg. It will reportedly be the largest number of cubesats to be flown in a single launch.
Planet’s launch comes at a time when the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee under the U.S. FAA is still considering if U.S. satellites can be sent to space on Indian launchers.
Even though the Indian space agency had launched 20 satellites in one shot on June 22, 2016, the launch of 104 satellites will surpass the 37 satellites launch record set in June 2014 by Russia’s Dnepr and 29 satellites launched by NASA in 2013.
Since September 2015, the PSLV has launched 18 small U.S. earth imaging satellites in a total of 79 foreign spacecrafts.
