ISRO to launch IIT-B’s satellite on Monday

MUMBAI: The Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B) will not suffer Monday morning blues on September 26. At 9.15am, the 389-seater auditorium at the Victor

MUMBAI: The Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B) will not suffer Monday morning blues on September 26. At 9.15am, the 389-seater auditorium at the Victor Menezes Convention Centre will see euphoric students hooting and applauding as the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will launch Pratham — the first microsatellite designed and developed by IIT-B — from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh eight years after it was conceptualised.

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Weighing around 10kgs and designed to fit within a 30-cm cube, Pratham will orbit at an altitude of 670kms. The microsatellite set to be launched on the PSLV- C35 will orbit over India at 11.25am every day. “The satellite will measure and map the total electron count in the ionosphere, which will help for predicting tsunamis. It will also enhance the accuracy of the GPS in India,” said Ratnesh Mishra, final-year student, aerospace engineering department, IIT-B, who worked on the satellite for three-and-a-half years.

Though the life cycle of the mission is four months, the team said the satellite will be able to continue collecting data on the electron count. With a ground station at the institute, the data collected during the first two months will be accessible only to the Pratham team. The satellite data collected over the next two months will be an open source that can be accessed by the student community. When the satellite passes over India, IIT-B will transmit the data so that any university with a small ground station will be able to detect the beacon signal from Pratham, and measure the total electron count above their respective ground stations.

To share information, IIT-B has helped set up ground stations to track the satellite at engineering colleges such as the Atharva College of Engineering, Malad. It has also collaborated with universities overseas such as the University College London and the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (Institute of Earth Physics of Paris). “We are looking forward to the success of this mission, which is at a basic level of scientific research,” said professor Hemendra Arya.