PSLV launch put off due to technical glitch
By IANSThursday, April 29, 2010
BANGALORE - India has put off the launch of an advanced remote sensing satellite, fixed for May 9, after a technical glitch in its Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle was detected, the space agency said here Thursday.
“A marginal drop in the pressure in second stage of the vehicle was noticed during the mandatory checks carried out on the PSLV-C15 vehicle,” the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said in a statement.
“The launch of ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C15) fixed for May 9, 2010, has been rescheduled. The new date for the launch of PSLV-C15 mission will be decided after preliminary results of the analysis are obtained,” the statement said.
PSLV-C15 is to launch India’s Cartosat-2B, an Algerian satellite ALSAT-2A, two nano satellites, NLS 6.1 and NLS 6.2 from University of Toronto, Canada, and STUDSAT, a satellite built by students from academic institutions in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.
PSLV-C15 was to lift off from the spaceport at Sriharikota, an island off the Andhra Pradesh coast.
Cartosat-2B, a 690-kg satellite, will carry a sophisticated panchromatic camera on board to take higher (0.8 metre) spatial resolution imageries with a swath of 9.6 km of specific spots for cartographic applications such as mapping, land information and geographical information system.
Studsat is built by college students from Bangalore and Hyderabad at a cost of Rs.5.5 million.
The Algerian Alsat communication satellite will be a commercial launch of the space agency’s commercial arm, Antrix Corporation.
Two weeks ago, India had failed in its attempt to test flight the indigenous super-cooled cryogenic upper stage engine on April 15.
About eight minutes after lift off the 416-tonne geo-synchronous satellite launch vehicle (GSLV-D3) deviated from the flight path at about 60 km and spun out of control to plunge into the Bay of Bengal along with the 2.2-tonne GSAT-4 on board.
