Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C17) Successfully Launches GSAT - 12 Satellite

India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C17) successfully launched GSAT-12 communication satellite today (July 15, 2011) from Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) SHAR, Sriharikota. The launch of PSLV-C17 was the eighteenth successive successful flight of PSLV.

After a smooth countdown of 53 hours, the vehicle lifted-off from the Second Launch Pad at the opening of the launch window at 16:48 hrs (IST). After about 20 minutes of flight time, GSAT-12 was successfully injected into sub-Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (sub-GTO) with a perigee of 284 km and an apogee of 21,020 km with an orbital inclination of 17.9 deg.

The preliminary flight data indicates that all major flight events involving stage ignition and burnouts, performance of solid and liquid stages, indigenously developed advanced mission computers and telemetry systems have performed well.

ISRO Telemetry Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC)'s ground station at Biak, Indonesia acquired the signals from GSAT-12 immediately after the injection of the satellite. The solar panels of the satellite were deployed automatically. Initial checks on the satellite have indicated normal health of the satellite.

India's Advanced Communication Satellite GSAT-8 Launched Successfully

India's advanced communication satellite, GSAT-8, was successfully launched at 02:08 hrs IST today (May 21, 2011) by the Ariane-V launch vehicle of Arianespace from Kourou. French Guiana. Ariane V placed GSAT-8 into the intended Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO) of 35,861 km apogee and 258 km perigee, with an orbital inclination of 2.503 deg with respect to equator.
ISRO's Master Control Facility (MCF) at Hassan in Karnataka acquired the signals from GSAT-8 satellite immediately after the injection. Initial checks on the satellite have indicated normal health of the satellite. The satellite was captured in three-axis stabilization mode. Preparations are underway for the firing of 440 Newton Liquid Apogee Motor (LAM) during the third orbit of the satellite on May 22, 2011 at 03:58 hrs IST as a first step towards taking the satellite to its geostationary orbital home.

About GSAT-8:

GSAT-8, India’s advanced communication satellite, is a high power communication satellite being inducted in the INSAT system. Weighing about 3100 Kg at lift-off, GSAT-8 is configured to carry 24 high power transponders in Ku-band and a two-channel GPS Aided Geo Augmented Navigation (GAGAN) payload operating in L1 and L5 bands.
The 24 Ku band transponders will augment the capacity in the INSAT system. The GAGAN payload provides the Satellite Based Augmentation System (SBAS), through which the accuracy of the positioning information obtained from the GPS Satellite is improved by a network of ground based receivers and made available to the users in the country through the geostationary satellites.

Mission : Communication

Weight : 3093 kg (Mass at Lift – off) 1426 kg (Dry Mass)

Power : Solar array providing 6242 watts three 100 Ah Lithium Ion batteries

Physical Dimensions : 2.0 x 1.77 x 3.1m cuboid

Propulsion : 440 Newton Liquid Apogee Motors (LAM) with mono Methyl Hydrazine (MMH) as fuel and Mixed oxides of Nitrogen (MON-3) as oxidizer for orbit raising.

Stabilizations : 3-axis body stabilized in orbit using Earth Sensors, Sun Sensors, Momentum and Reaction Wheels, Magnetic Torques and eight 10 Newton and eight 22 Newton bipropellant thrusters

Antennas : Two indigenously developed 2.2 m diameter transmit/receive polarization sensitive dual grid shaped beam deployable reflectors with offset-fed feeds illumination for Ku-band; 0.6 m C-band and 0.8x0.8 sq m L-band helix antenna for GAGAN

Launch date : 21-May-11

Launch site : Kourou, French Guiana

Launch vehicle : Ariane-5 VA-202

Orbit : Geosynchronous (55° E)

Mission life : More Than 12 Years

ISRO Builds India's Fastest Supercomputer

Indian Space Research Organisation has built a supercomputer, which is to be India's fastest supercomputer in terms of theoretical peak performance of 220 TeraFLOPS (220 Trillion Floating Point Operations per second). The supercomputing facility named as Satish Dhawan Supercomputing Facility is located at Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram. The new Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) based supercomputer named "SAGA-220" (Supercomputer for Aerospace with GPU Architecture-220 TeraFLOPS) is being used by space scientists for solving complex aerospace problems. The supercomputer SAGA-220 was inaugurated by Dr K Radhakrishnan, Chairman, ISRO today at VSSC.

"SAGA-220" Supercomputer is fully designed and built by Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre using commercially available hardware, open source software components and in house developments. The system uses 400 NVIDIA Tesla 2070 GPUs and 400 Intel Quad Core Xeon CPUs supplied by WIPRO with a high speed interconnect. With each GPU and CPU providing a performance of 500 GigaFLOPS and 50 GigaFLOPS respectively, the theoretical peak performance of the system amounts to 220 TeraFLOPS. The present GPU system offers significant advantage over the conventional CPU based system in terms of cost, power and space requirements. The total cost of this Supercomputer is about Rs. 14 crores. The system is environmentally green and consumes a power of only 150 kW. This system can also be easily scaled to many PetaFLOPS (1000 TeraFLOPS).