The rocket will also put into orbit seven other small satellites.
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Pratham is the first satellite programme started by students in the country. Weighting 320 ton, this PSLV rocket will take eight satellites of which three belong to India and rest five are from foreign.
The group of around thirty students, who have been a part of this project for more than 8 years were funded by the IIT, however, they were helped immensely by the ISRO, who helped them in various ways to come up with the final satellite, that is all set to launch on 26th of September 2016.
The five satellites from foreign are: three from Algeria (Alsat-1B 103kg, Alsat-2B 117kg, Alsat-1N 7kg), one from Canada (NLS-19, 8kg) and the last one is from the US (Pathfinder-44kg).
According to Isro, while the main satellite, ScatSat-1, will be placed into a 720-km polar sun synchronous orbit, the remaining ones will go into a 670-km polar sun synchronous orbit. As indicated by ISRO, SCATSAT-1 is a progression mission for Oceansat-2 scatterometer to give wind vector information to climate gauging, cyclone identification and tracking provisions. It will be turned on after one hour and 22 minutes for a short period (about 20 seconds) before being turned off again. The satellite, however, missed its launch in 2012 due to several reasons, including lack of manpower, administrative delay and technical faults.
“Restarting a rocket engine soon after it is shut off is a critical technology that has to be mastered”. Once a rocket engine is activated, a great amount of heat is generated.
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“This is entirely different from switching on and switching off the communication satellite’s engines in space”. The interval between two restarts of a communication satellite engine will be in days.
