Indian-made European satellite in geostationary orbit
By IANSTuesday, November 30, 2010
BANGALORE - The Indian-made European communication satellite Hylas Tuesday went into geo-stationary orbit and is in good health, the space agency said.
“Hylas (Highly Adaptable Satellite) is orbiting around the earth at 35,521km (perigee) and 35,800km (apogee) away and is in the radio-visibility of our master control facility (MCF) at Hassan in Karnataka,” the state-run Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said in a statement here.
Perigee is the distance nearest to the earth and apogee farthest from the earth, which orbits elliptically around the sun while rotating on its own axis.
The 2.5-tonne heavy satellite was jointly built by ISRO with its commercial arm Antrix and European Aeronautical & Defence Space (EADS) with Astrium, the satellite and space system manufacturer, for the British-based Avanti Communications.
Within minutes after Hylas was launched on board the European Ariane-5 rocket from the Guyana space centre at Korou in French Guyana Saturday, the space agency’s MCF took its control and command operations and injected it into an elliptical geo-synchronous transfer orbit.
“The perigee was raised from 250km to 35,521km by firing the satellite’s liquid apogee motor (LAM) of 432 Newton thrust level in three phases-Sunday for 79 minutes, Monday for 30 minutes) and Tuesday for four minutes,” the statement said.
Of the satellite’s 10 high-power transponders in Ka and Ku band frequencies, designed to deliver high-speed broadband services in Europe, one of them was successfully deployed after it reached the designated orbit.
ISRO won the contract in 2006 for building the satellite against stiff competition from other leading manufacturers in the US and Europe.
