ISRO panel to probe anomalous behaviour of Insat-3D

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has constituted a committee chaired by a retired top official to probe the "anomalies" on the country's advanced weather satellite Insat-3D immediately after its launch on July 26.

ISRO officials faced anxious moments as the spacecraft was "untraceable" for some time before it could be tracked by the space agency's Master Control Facility (MCF) at Hassan. "A committee headed by T K Alex, a former Director of ISRO Satellite Centre, has been formed to look into the issue," an ISRO source said.

It's immediately not clear if the primary system had suffered damage, and if it had implications vis-a-vis intended life of the spacecraft. Sources said the remaining critical operations were carried out using redundant system.

Meanwhile, ISRO said in a statement today that the Insat-3D, launched by European consortium Arianespace's rocket from Kourou, French Guiana, has successfully been placed in a geosynchronous orbit after three orbit raising manoeuvres commanded from MCF. "Though there was an anomalous behaviour of the satellite after the deployment of its solar panel,the Mission Operations Team of ISRO could immediately bring the Satellite into normalcy using prescribed contingency procedures and then resume the orbit-raising operations," ISRO said.

Insat-3D is now moving towards its final geostationary orbital location of 82 degree East longitude and on August 6 it will reach it, it said. Subsequently, the two meteorological payloads (imaging system and atmospheric sounder), as well as the two transponders (of the Meteorological Data Relay and Satellite-aided Search and Rescue system) would be activated by August 8, the ISRO statement said.