By TIOL News Service

NEW DELHI, DEC 28, 2017: THE year 2017 was a year of milestones for the Department of Space which launched 104 satellites, in a single launch, onboard PSLV-C37 on February 15, 2017 and 31 satellites, in a single launch, on-board PSLV-C38 on June 23, 2017. These satellites included – Two Indian Cartosat-2 series satellites, two Indian Nano-Satellites, one Nano satellite from Indian University and 130 foreign satellites from 19 countries, viz. Austria, Belgium, Chile, Czech Republic, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, Israel, Japan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Switzerland, The Netherlands, UAE, UK and USA. The Cartosat-2 series satellites were placed in a sun synchronous orbit with a designed mission life of five years. The main objective of these satellites is to provide high resolution images of earth's surface at sub-meter resolution (Black & White image) and at 2 meter resolution (4-band coloured image). The images obtained from these satellites are useful in variety of applications requiring high resolution images, which include cartography, infrastructure planning, urban & rural development, utility management, natural resources inventory & management, disaster management.

India's Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark-II (GSLV-F09) successfully launched the 2230 kg South Asia Satellite (GSAT-9) into its planned Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO) on May 05, 2017. The launch of GSLV was its eleventh and took place from the Second Launch Pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR (SDSC SHAR), Sriharikota, the spaceport of India. This was the fourth consecutive success achieved by GSLV carrying indigenously developed Cryogenic Upper Stage.

The first developmental flight (GSLV MkIII-D1) of India's heavy lift launch vehicle GSLV Mk-III was successfully conducted on June 05, 2017 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR, Sriharikota with the launch of GSAT-19 satellite. This was the first orbital mission of GSLV MkIII which was mainly intended to evaluate the vehicle performance including that of its fully indigenous cryogenic upper stage during the flight. Weighing 3136 kg at lift-off, GSAT-19 became the heaviest satellite launched from the Indian soil. 

On June 29, 2017, GSAT-17 became India's third communication satellite to successfully reach orbit in two months. GSAT-17 was launched by the European Ariane 5 Launch Vehicle from Kourou, French Guiana.

AstroSat, India's multi-wavelength space telescope completed two years in orbit during the year and has successfully accomplished the difficult task of measuring X-ray polarisation. In a paper published in ‘Nature Astronomy', the team documented the results of their eighteen-month study of the Crab pulsar in the Taurus Constellation and measured the variations of polarisation as this highly magnetised object spins around 30 times every second. This landmark measurement puts up a strong challenge to prevailing theories of high energy X-ray emission from pulsars.