In its 36th flight (PSLV-C34), ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle successfully launched the 5 kg Cartosat-2 Series Satellite along with 19 co-passenger satellites morning from Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR, Sriharikota.
This is the thirty fifth consecutively successful mission of PSLV and the fourteenth in its ‘XL’ configuration.
The total weight of all the 20 satellites carried on-board PSLV-C34 was 1288 kg.
The imagery sent by the Cartosat-2 series satellite will be useful for cartographic applications, urban and rural applications, coastal land use and regulation, utility management like road network monitoring, water distribution, creation of land use maps, precision study, change detection to bring out geographical and manmade features and various other Land Information System (LIS) and Geographical Information System (GIS) applications.
With’s successful launch, the total number of satellites launched by India’s workhorse launch vehicle PSLV has reached 113, of which 39 are Indian and the remaining 74 from abroad.
Of the 19 co-passenger satellites carried by PSLV-C34, two – SATHYABAMASAT weighing 1.5 kg and SWAYAM weighing 1 kg – are University/Academic institute satellites and were built with the involvement of students from Sathyabama University, Chennai and College Of Engineering, Pune, respectively.
The remaining 17 co-passenger satellites were international customer satellites from Canada (2), Germany (1), Indonesia (1) and the United States (13).
20 SATELLITES:
Sathyabamasat (satellite of Sathyabama University in Chennai),
Swayam satellite (College of Engineering in Pune),
Cartosat-2 (India),
LAPAN-A3 (Indonesia),
BIROS (Germany),
M3MSat (Canada),
SkySat Gen2-1 (USA) of Terra Bela (Google company),
GHGSat-D (Canada)
12 Dove Satellites (USA) were the other satellites that were launched.