How an Apple saved Isro away from long-term dependence
Bengaluru: The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) has become one of the first picks for countries looking to launch satellites. The situation was not always like this. Thirty-five years ago, on June 19, 1981, Isro successfully launched its first communication satellite, Ariane Passenger PayLoad Experiment (Apple), on Ariane-1 from Kourou, French Guiana.
Bhaskara and Rohini had been successes before Apple. But Apple laid the foundation for indigenous development of operational communication satellites which grew into a very large constellation of satellites in Insat and Gsat series that spurred the country’s technological and economic growth. Newer applications like tele-education, tele-medicine, Village Resource Centre, Disaster Management System etc were enabled through space technology.
According to the book ‘Fishing Hamlet to Red Planet’, although the satellite was launched through Ariane, Apple was boosted into Geo-Synchronous Orbit by Isro’s own apogee motor derived from the fourth stage motor of the SLV-3. It kicked off Isro’s impeccable record with deadlines. While the agency is known to have built the Mars Orbiter Mission in 18 months, it continued a long tradition and the agency had designed and built Apple in just two years with limited infrastructure in industrial sheds.
Meanwhile, the final 48-hour countdown to Isro’s record-breaking mission, which will place 20 satellites – 17 from abroad – in the same orbit, kicked off on Monday. The launch of the PSLV C-34 /Cartosat-2 series satellite mission is slated for June 22 at Sriharikota.
The low-cost commercial foreign satellite launch services of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) are poised to take a severe Read more
