http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/te...ro-to-probe/article19604368.ece?homepage=true
The Space establishment has started to diagnose what went wrong in
Thursday’s failed launch of PSLV-C39. The launch resulted in the stillbirth of its much-needed navigation satellite IRNSS-1H.
A review meeting is slated for Saturday in Thiruvananthapuram, seat of the launch vehicle centre, according to people familiar with the developments.
An informed official said the analysis should be completed before the next launches of the PSLV and the GSLV came up, starting October or November.
Indian Space Research Organisation has given up on the satellite, which along with the launcher could have cost it an estimated ₹300-400 crore.
A debris tracking team linked to the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram has been monitoring the
unreleased satellite which is moving in a low orbit even as it sits trapped inside the heat shield.
V.Adimurthy, Adviser at ISRO, former VSSC Associate Director and former Chairman of the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC), said,
“The spacecraft is in a low orbit and there will be natural decay. Going by its falling pattern, we expect it to fall back to Earth may be between four and eight weeks.”
Most of its parts of the 1425-kg will burn up as it re-enters the atmosphere. The huge quantity of propellants on it is also a worry. ISRO is part of the IADC and will also get inputs of the North American debris watch body, NORAD.
ISRO veterans who have been associated with launch vehicle activity recounted that they knew they had a problem three minutes after the rocket carrying IRNSS-1H took off.
During the 19-minute flight,
the heat shield or topmost nose cone of the PSLV-C-39 rocket should have separated after three minutes and fallen off but it did not happen. At that point, the second of the four-stage rocket was at a height of around 125 km.
Instead, the heat shield continued to travel with the spacecraft still inside it.
Normally the satellite would have got safely exposed and zoomed ahead at that point. This adversely added undesirable weight to the spacecraft and dragged its velocity.
The satellite is encased in a heat shield - also called payload fairings - in the top fourth stage to protect it from atmospheric disruptions.
After around 100 km above ground, it does not need the heat protection.
Teams have started ascertaining what went wrong, because the rest of the launch milestones went off as planned except for the heat shield issue – which never cropped up earlier, they said.
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http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/te...al-for-pslv/article19604353.ece?homepage=true
Planned missions of the PSLV rocket and its big brother GSLV would go on as scheduled in the coming months, according to statements made by ISRO Chairman A.S.Kiran Kumar at Sriharikota after the launch and separately by VSSC Director K.Sivan.
The next PSLV mission is tentatively due in November or December to launch a Cartosat-2 series remote sensing satellite. It may also carry smaller customer satellites.
A GSLV flight may take place later this year to put military communications satellite GSAT-6A to space to support the older GSAT-6. A heavy-lift GSLV Mark III carrying a large communications satellite is also likely in February 2018.
Antrix Corporation, which has signed a series of launch contracts for the PSLV, sees its reliability and market intact as the latest problem would be overcome.
Rakesh Sasibhusan, Chairman and Managing Director of Antrix, said, “Launch mishaps or anomalies are an inevitable part of the space business. Every space agency has these moments."
Antrix currently has firm agreements for launching 16 foreign spacecraft; satellite operators are discussing over a dozen more launches with it, he told
The Hindu.
Other commercial launchers (for example, Soyuz, Proton and SpaceX) may have suffered failures and continue to be in demand, he said.
The PSLV, popular in the category to lift 5-kg to 800-kg spacecraft to space, remains a reliable vehicle to customers as it has delivered 39 continuous successes over 23 years.
It also operates in a global market segment where such services are not readily available to satellite operators, he said.
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http://www.thehindu.com/news/nation...v-stacks-up-against-peers/article19608785.ece
A panoramic view of the fully assembled PSLV-C23 at the First Launch Pad with Mobile Service Tower. | Photo Credit:
ISRO
Of the 41 times the PSLV has been pressed into service, it has only failed twice, thereby giving it a success rate of 95.13%. This should be seen in relation to other rocket launchers such as China's Long March, Russia's Soyuz, and the European Space Agency's Ariane 5.
After 24 years of gravity-defying service as the conduit embodying India's aerospace ambitions, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), came up short in delivering its payload to the reaches of outer space, on Thursday. This was its first failure after 39 successful launches, where it deposited with great acuity, innumerable satellites in pre-ordained paths in the earth's orbit.
A PSLV flight lasts 19 minutes, and has been used in ferrying small-to-medium sized satellites. After being commissioned in 1993 by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO),
it had cemented its position as the workhorse in India's space programme, successfully launching 209 satellites.
After it went commercial in 1999 under the Antrix Corporation masthead, PSLV has seen its stock rise, launching satellites of 28 different countries. It created launch history in February 2017, when it placed a record haul of 104 spacecrafts in orbit. Of the 104, only three were indigenous satellites, the others being from countries as diverse as Israel and Kazakhstan. The previous record was held by the Russian rocket launcher, Dnepr, when it lobbed 37 satellites into desired orbits.
Of the 41 times the PSLV has been pressed into service, it has only failed twice, thereby giving it a success rate of 95.13%. This should be seen in relation to other rocket launchers such as China's Long March, Russia's Soyuz, and the European Space Agency's Ariane 5.
The Long March family of rocket launchers successfully notched 236 missions of the 250 undertaken since its induction in 1970, rendering it a success rate of 94.4%. The Russian space programme which predates its Indian counterpart has an illustrious history of successful missions despite the Soyuz U registering a failure in December 2016.
There have been 1,209 launches of all nine variants of the Soyuz, of which 37 missions failed to reach the desired orbit. This yields a success rate of 97% over a period of time ranging as far back as 1966, during the early days of the Cold War when the space race had become a matter of prestige between the Soviet Union and the United States in their quest to shape a new world order after World War II.
Similarly,
the European Space Agency's Ariane 5 enjoys a success rate of 95.7% with a total of 90 launches undertaken. However, it holds a clean sheet since June 2003, completing 80 successive missions without failure.
Interplanetary transportation company SpaceX, which is owned by Tesla-founder Elon Musk, reported only two failures in 34 missions of its Falcon 9 rocket launcher, which has been contracted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to deliver its payloads. This translates into a success rate of 94.1%. Another NASA contractor, Lockheed Martin-Boeing, is the only anomaly in an industry where the margin of failure has empirically hovered around 5% to 10%. In the 53 flights undertaken since it was commissioned in 2010, the Atlas 5 has never failed.
According to data compiled by
Space Flight, a total of 85 orbital launch attempts were made in 2016 by eight countries, of which two were outright failures. The countries that undertook rocket launches in 2016 were the United States, China, Russia, India, Israel, Japan, the EU bloc, and North Korea.
What sets the PSLV apart is its comparatively low cost per launch of ₹90 crore ($15 million). This is in contrast to NASA missions launched by Space X and Lockheed Martin-Boeing at estimated costs of $132.4 million and $62 million respectively.