ISRO arm’s second commercial mission for Singapore
NEW DELHI : New Space India Ltd (NSIL), the commercial space missions arm of the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), on Monday, announced the second consecutive commercial space mission, scheduled to take-off aboard Isro’s trusted rocket Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) on 31 July. The mission, numbered PSLV-C56, will deploy one primary and six additional satellites as part of the mission’s entire payload.
The primary payload for the mission is the Singapore government’s Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA)’s DS-SAR satellite, which will be used by Singapore government agencies for satellite imaging applications. The mission comes just over three months after the previous PSLV mission, dubbed PSLV-C55, which deployed two satellites from Singapore in orbit.
The latter were Singapore’s ‘TeLEOS-2’ as the primary payload, and Lumelite-4 as secondary payload. The six secondary payloads flying aboard the PSLV mission on 31 July include two technology demonstrator satellites Velox-Am and Scoob-II, an experimental satellite called Atmospheric Coupling and Dynamics Explorer (Arcade), private nanosatellite NuLIon, and two others—Galassia-2 and Orb-12 Strider.
The PSLV-C56 mission for Isro and NSIL comes after the central space agency launched its third moon mission, Chandrayaan-3, on 14 July. The mission will seek to land a rover and a landing module in the lunar south pole—making India the first country in the world to do so.
So far, China remains the only nation to have succeeded in landing on the moon in its first attempt—India’s Chandrayaan-2 failed to land on the moon, four years ago. The Chandrayaan-3 mission, however, is different from NSIL’s commercial missions using the PSLV satellite-launching rocket.
. Read more on livemint.com
