ISRO's PSLVC-45 successfully injects EMISAT into sun-synchronous polar orbit

The Indian Space Research Organisation's PSLVC-45 successfully injected electronic intelligence satellite EMISAT along with 28 international customer satellites into sun-synchronous polar orbit on Monday.

The low-Earth orbit satellite was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota at 9.30 am. This comes days after India test-fired an anti-satellite (ASAT) missile in the Mission Shakti operation."The countdown for the launch on the PSLV, in its 47th flight, began at 6:27 am on Sunday. This will be the 71st launch vehicle mission for Sriharikota," ISRO said. The satellite that weighs 436 kg will monitor and provide locations for enemy radar sites deep in their territory.

"PSLVC-45 launch is a very important milestone for the ISRO. It is not only going to launch our own satellite for signal monitoring but also 28 satellites from four other countries including the USA. The uniqueness of this mission is -- it is going to place satellites in three different orbits, perhaps for the first time," former ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair told ANI. The PS4 orbital platform is envisaged to provide a microgravity environment for research organisations and academic institutes to perform experiments. In this mission, the PS4 hosts three payloads, namely, Automatic Identification System (AIS) from ISRO, Automatic Packet Repeating System (APRS) from AMSAT (Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation), India and Advanced Retarding Potential Analyzer for Ionospheric Studies (ARIS) from Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST).The launch carries 28 international customer satellites from four countries -- Lithuania, Spain, Switzerland and the USA. All these satellites are being launched under commercial arrangements.For the first time, the ISRO has invited common people to view the launch.