India successfully places its 'eye in the sky' satellite into orbit

With this, the Indian space agency began its 2022 romance with space missions

Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) PSLV-C52 carrying EOS-04, an earth observation satellite, and two other small satellites soared into the sky on Monday morning from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, marking the space agency’s first launch in 2022.

All three satellites were put into their intended orbits by the PSLV-C52 rocket, making 2022’s first mission successful. The launch was very crucial was for the ISRO whose earlier attempt to launch an earth observation satellite, EOS-03, failed in August 2021.

The Covid-19 pandemic hit the ISRO very hard with the agency being able to have just three launches in 2020, four less when compared to 2019, and only one in 2021, which also ended in a failure.

The PSLV-C52 carrying EOS-04, INSPIREsat-1 and INS-2TD lifted off from the first launch pad of the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota at 5.59 am. Eighteen minutes later, the satellites were put into their “right orbits.”

“The mission of PSLV-C52/EOS-04 has been successfully accomplished. The primary satellite EOS-04 has been put into a very precise orbit by PSLV. Two co-passenger satellites have also been placed into their right orbits,” S Somanath, Director, ISRO, announced.

He also said the EOS-04 earth observation satellite will be one of the “biggest assets” to the country. “We will be back again with the next launch of the PSLV very soon,” Somanath announced, as the ISRO gears up for a busy 2022 with at least 18 more satellite launches planned during the year.

EOS-04, which has a mission life of 10 years, is a radar imaging satellite designed to provide high-quality images under all weather conditions for applications such as agriculture, forestry & plantations, soil moisture and hydrology and flood mapping.

Weighing 1,710 kg, EOS-04, an earth observation satellite, was put into a sun-synchronous polar orbit of 529 km by PSLV-C52.

While INSPIREsat-1 is a student satellite from the Indian Institute of Space Science & Technology (IIST) in association with the Laboratory of Atmospheric & Space Physics at the University of Colorado, INS-2TD is a boulder and a technology demonstrator satellite from Isro, which is a precursor to India-Bhutan Joint Satellite (INS-2B).

Monday’s launch was the first under new Somanath who succeeded Dr K Sivan as ISRO chairman on January 14. His contributions in PSLV and GSLV Mk-III were in their overall architecture, propulsion stages design, structural and structural dynamics designs, separation systems, vehicle integration and integration procedures development.