Gist: Space Agencies: ISRO > NASA > EU, ISS

Notebook: Space(ISRO) and Science Created: 2/18/2017 5:48 PM Updated: 5/4/2018 5:39 AM Author: Siya Rasik Tags: GS-III_(13)_IT_Space_Robotics-Computers_Nano-Bio technology_IPR, PRE_SCIENCE URL: http://www.insightsonindia.com/2016/08/29/insights-daily-current-affairs-29-august-2016/ ISRO

Introduction:

What is micro satellite, nano satellite ?

2018

GREATEST SPACE MISSION ( ISRO, NASA, ESA)

Juno Mission - NASA ( See, section below )

42nd Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), PSLV-C40 - January 2018

Major satellites launched:

The Cartosat-2, whose imagery will be used to develop various land and geographical information system applications, was placed in a circular polar sun synchronous orbit 505 km from the Earth. The satellite's design life is five years.

Two technology demonstrators

One is a microsatellite of the 100 kg class. "This is a technology demonstrator and the forerunner for future satellites of this series,"

The other one, a nanosatellite, named Indian Nano Satellite (INS) - 1C, is the third in its series; its predecessors were part of the PSLV-C37 launch of February 2017. The INS-1C, whose mission life is six months, carries the Miniature Multispectral Technology Demonstration payload from the Space Applications Centre. "With a capability to carry up to 3 kg of payload and a total satellite mass of 11 kg, it offers immense opportunities for future use,"

Aditya - L1 First Indian mission to study the Sun The Aditya-1 mission was conceived as a 400kg class satellite carrying one payload, the Visible Emission Line Coronagraph (VELC) and was planned to launch in a 800 km low earth orbit.

A Satellite placed in the halo orbit around the Lagrangian point 1 (L1) of the Sun-Earth system has the major advantage of continuously viewing the Sun without any occultation/ eclipses.

Therefore, the Aditya-1 mission has now been revised to “Aditya-L1 mission” and will be inserted in a halo orbit around the L1, which is 1.5 million km from the Earth. The satellite carries additional six payloads with enhanced science scope and objectives.

The project is approved and the satellite will be launched during 2019 – 2020 timeframe by PSLV-XL from Sriharikota.

Aditya-1 was meant to observe only the solar corona. The outer layers of the Sun, extending to thousands of km above the disc (photosphere) is termed as the corona. It has a temperature of more than a million degree Kelvin which is much higher than the solar disc temperature of around 6000K. How the corona gets heated to such high temperatures is still an unanswered question in solar physics.

Lagrange Point: A Lagrange point is a location in the space where the combined gravitational forces of two large bodies, such as Earth and the Sun or Earth and the moon, equal the centrifugal force felt by much smaller third body.

Race to the Moon: Team Indus - Google and Xprize TeamIndus had already tied up with the Indian Space Research Organisation’s PSLV rocket to send its spacecraft, ECA (short for Ek Chotisi Asha, ‘one small wish’ in Hindi), to the moon on or around December 28.

Launch Vehicle: PSLV and GSLV

PSLV

4-stage launch vehicle Impeccable 27 success in 39 flights GSLV Leader in the category of rockets that lift small satellites to low Earth orbits or LEOs. These satellites weigh up to 500 kg and 3 stage launch vehicle must be placed in polar orbits 500 km from 50% success rate Earth. Solid + Solid + Cryogenic (liquified Gas ) 4 stage launch vehicle Solid Fuel: HTPB Liquid Propellant: UDMH (Manufactured in LPSC in Mahendergi in Tamil Nadu ). GSLV - Mark III It is a four stage launch vehicle (Two liquid stage and two solid stage) with a height of 44m Three stage: Solid + Liquid + Largest First and Third stage using solid rocket cryogenic engine motors and second and fourth stage using liquid rocket engines It has three variants- PSLV-G, PSLV - CA, PSLV – XL.

Both PSLV (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle) and GSLV (Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle) are the satellite-launch vehicles (rockets) developed by ISRO.

PSLV is designed mainly to deliver the “earth-observation” or “remote- sensing” satellites with lift-off mass of up to about 1750 Kg to Sun- Synchronous circular polar orbits of 600-900 Km altitude.

The remote sensing satellites orbit the earth from pole-to-pole (at about 98 deg orbital-plane inclination). An orbit is called sun-synchronous when the angle between the line joining the centre of the Earth and the satellite and the Sun is constant throughout the orbit.

Due to their sun-synchronism nature, these orbits are also referred to as “Low Earth Orbit (LEO)” which enables the on-board camera to take images of the earth under the same sun-illumination conditions during each of the repeated visits, the satellite makes over the same area on ground thus making the satellite useful for earth resources monitoring.

Apart from launching the remote sensing satellites to Sun-synchronous polar orbits, the PSLV is also used to launch the satellites of lower lift-off mass of up to about 1400 Kg to the elliptical Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO). PSLV is a four-staged launch vehicle with first and third stage using solid rocket motors and second and fourth stages using liquid rocket engines. It also uses strap-on motors to augment the thrust provided by the first stage, and depending on the number of these strap-on boosters, the PSLV is classified into its various versions like core-alone version (PSLV-CA), PSLV-G or PSLV-XL variants.

The GSLV is designed mainly to deliver the communication-satellites to the highly elliptical (typically 250 x 36000 Km) Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO). The satellite in GTO is further raised to its final destination, viz., Geo-synchronous Earth orbit (GEO) of about 36000 Km altitude (and zero deg inclination on equatorial plane) by firing its in-built on-board engines.

Due to their geo-synchronous nature, the satellites in these orbits appear to remain permanently fixed in the same position in the sky, as viewed from a particular location on Earth, thus avoiding the need of a tracking ground antenna and hence are useful for the communication applications.

Two versions of the GSLV are being developed by ISRO. The first version, GSLV Mk-II, has the capability to launch satellites of lift-off mass of up to 2,500 kg to the GTO and satellites of up to 5,000 kg lift-off mass to the LEO. GSLV MK-II is a three-staged vehicle with first stage using solid rocket motor, second stage using Liquid fuel and the third stage, called Cryogenic Upper Stage, using cryogenic engine.

Indigenous Cryogenic Engine and Stage A Cryogenic rocket stage is more efficient and provides more thrust for every kilogram of propellant it burns compared to solid and earth- storable liquid propellant rocket stages. Specific impulse (a measure of the efficiency) achievable with cryogenic propellants (liquid Hydrogen and liquid Oxygen) is much higher compared to earth storable liquid and solid propellants, giving it a substantial payload advantage. However, cryogenic stage is technically a very complex system compared to solid or earth- storable liquid propellant stages due to its use of propellants at extremely low temperatures and the associated thermal and structural problems.

Oxygen liquifies at -183 deg C and Hydrogen at -253 deg C. The propellants, at these low temperatures are to be pumped using turbo pumps running at around 40,000 rpm. It also entails complex ground support systems like propellant storage and filling systems, cryo engine and stage test facilities, transportation and handling of cryo fluids and related safety aspects. ISRO's Cryogenic Upper Stage Project (CUSP) envisaged the design and development of the indigenous Cryogenic Upper Stage to replace the stage procured from Russia and used in GSLV flights. The main engine and two smaller steering engines of CUS together develop a nominal thrust of 73.55 kN in vacuum. During the flight, CUS fires for a nominal duration of 720 seconds.

Liquid Oxygen (LOX) and Liquid Hydrogen (LH2) from the respective tanks are fed by individual booster pumps to the main turbopump to ensure a high flow rate of propellants into the combustion chamber. Thrust control and mixture ratio control are achieved by two independent regulators. Two gimballed steering engines provide for control of the stage during its thrusting phase.

Pratham is an Indian ionospheric research microsatellite which will be operated by the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay as part of the Student Satellite Initiative. Its primary mission is to count electrons in the Earth's ionosphere. It was successfully launched on 26th September 2016 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota, Andra Pradesh along with 7 other satellites on PSLV C-35.

Indian National Satellite(INSAT)

One of the largest domestic communcation satellite system in Asia-Pacific region

Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) System

One of the largest constellations of earth observation satellites in operation.

Early development: GPS Aided Geo Augmented Navigation (GAGAN)

GPS Aided GEO Augmented Navigation (GAGAN): This is a Satellite Based Augmentation System (SBAS) implemented jointly with Airport Authority of India (AAI). The main objectives of GAGAN are to provide Satellite-based Navigation services with accuracy and integrity required for civil aviation applications and to provide better Air Traffic Management over Indian Airspace. The system will be interoperable with other international SBAS systems and provide seamless navigation across regional boundaries. The GAGAN Signal-In-Space (SIS) is available through GSAT-8 and GSAT-10.

NAVigation with Indian Constellation (NAVIC)

An independent Indian Satellite based regional positioning system with a constellation of seven satellites for critical national application (will be operational shortly). With this India will join the club of US, EU, CHINA and Russia.

IRNSS-1H is planned to be launched as IRNSS-1A three rubidium clock is not functioning properly. Indian Regional Nevigation Satellite System: NavIC

NavIC, the indigenously based satellite based positioning system. Give precise information on position, navigation and time (PNT) It has 7 IRNSS satellites, having three rubidium clock on each launched between 2013 and 2016. A minimum of four working satellites was sufficient to realize the full use of Navigation system. IRNSS-1H is being sent to space to back up -- and mostly replace -- the functions of India's first navigation satellite. IRNSS-1A was launched four years back. Indian Space Research Organisation had to quickly get two back-ups ready when all three rubidium atomic clocks on 1A failed around mid-2016. Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) also known as NavIC (Navigation with Indian Constellation) is an independent regional navigation satellite system being developed by India. It is designed to provide accurate position information service to users in India as well as the region extending up to 1500 km from its boundary, which is its primary service area.

Mars Orbiter Mission - Mars Orbiter Mission spacecraft launched in 2014

Marking India's first venture into the interplanetary space, MOM will explore and observe Mars surface features, morphology, mineralogy and the Martian atmosphere. Further, a specific search for methane in the Martian atmosphere will provide information about the possibility or the past existence of life on the planet.

The Rs450-crore MOM mission aims at studying the Martian surface and mineral composition as well as scan its atmosphere for methane (an indicator of life on Mars). The Mars Orbiter has five scientific instruments—Lyman Alpha Photometer (LAP), Methane Sensor for Mars (MSM), Mars Exospheric Neutral Composition Analyser (MENCA), Mars Colour Camera (MCC) and Thermal Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (TIS). This mission made India to become one of the four nations in the world to send space mission to Planet Mars. India became the first country in the world to insert a spacecraft into the Martian orbit in its very first attempt.

Chardrayaan - I

Astrosat

ASTROSAT is India’s first dedicated multi wavelength space observatory. ASTROSAT will observe universe in the optical, Ultraviolet, low and high energy X-ray regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. India’s observatory will be the fourth in space, after the Hubble(USA), Russia’s Spektr R and Suzaku of Japan. ASTROSAT with a lift-off mass of about 1513 kg was launched into a 650 km orbit inclined at an angle of 6 deg to the equator by PSLV-C30. ASTROSAT will observe universe in the optical, Ultraviolet, low and high energy X-ray regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, whereas most other scientific satellites are capable of observing a narrow range of wavelength band.

CZT Imager of AstroSat measures first phase resolved X-ray polarisation of Crab pulsar

Cartosat

Remote sensing and mapping LIS and GIS purpose Cartosat 2 series

EduSat GSAT-3, known as EDUSAT is meant for distant class room education from school level to higher education. This was the first dedicated "Educational Satellite" that provide the country with satellite based two way communication to class room for delivering educational materials.

This is a Geo-synchronous satellite developed on I-2K bus. GSAT-3 was co-located with METSAT(KALPANA-1) and INSAT-3C at 74o E longitude.

Supersonic Combustion (SC)-RAMJET ENGINE

India becomes the only fourth country in the world to successfully test scramjet engine after United States, Russia and European Union. ISRO used an Advanced Technology Vehicle(ATV), a sound rocket for the test. Two scramjet engines were at the sides of rocket. SCRAMJET breathes air and uses high speed vehicle to forcefully compress the incoming air before combustion. While, conventional uses fan to compress air before combustion. Reduces the amount of oxygen carried abroad as it is taken up from the atmosphere.

Key to develop single stage to orbit launch vehicle A geosynchronous / geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) is an elliptical orbit, with an apogee (high point) of 35,784 km, a perigee (low point) of a few hundred km, and an inclination roughly equal to the latitude of the launch site, into which a spacecraft is initially placed before being transferred to a geosynchronous or geostationary orbit. It is important that launches of GSO satellites take place as close to the equator as possible It is not a circular orbit.

INSAT-3DR similar to INSAT-3D, is an advanced meteorological satellite of India configured with an imaging System and an Atmospheric Sounder. Satellite was launched with the help of locally made cryogenic engine

The GSAT satellites are India's indigenously developed technologies of communications satellites, used for digital audio, data and video broadcasting.

GSAT - 9 (SAARC satellite!!)

Data from GSAT-9 will be shared with Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. It was also offered to Pakistan, which turned it down. Communication satellite, disaster management The 2,230-kg communication spacecraft will support communication, broadcasting and Internet services, disaster management, tele-medicine, tele-education, weather forecasting in a region that is geographically challenging, economically lagging with limited technological resources, they echoed in their addresses. the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite - Worlds most expensive earth-imaging satellite is developed jointly.

NASA

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is scheduled for launch in 2018 to explore the Sun’s outer atmosphere.

Parker Solar Probe will travel through the sun’s atmosphere, closer to the surface than any spacecraft before it, facing brutal heat and radiation conditions — and ultimately providing humanity with the closest-ever observations of a star.

Parker Solar Probe will use Venus’ gravity during seven flybys over nearly seven years to gradually bring its orbit closer to the sun.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft

The primary goals of the $1.1 billion mission are to find out whether Jupiter has a solid core, and whether there is water in the planet’s atmosphere — something that may not only provide vital clues to how the planet formed and evolved, but also to how the solar system we live in came into existence. At the end of its mission, Juno will dive into Jupiter’s atmosphere and burn up — a “deorbit” maneuver that is necessary to ensure that it does not crash into and contaminate the Jovian moons Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

Cassini The Cassini team found evidence of hydrothermal vents on Enceladus’s (Saturn moon ) ocean floor. NASA’s Cassini has completed a final, distant flyby of Saturns’s giant moon Titan. This distant encounter is referred to informally as “the goodbye kiss” by mission engineers, because it provides a gravitational nudge that sends the spacecraft toward its dramatic ending in Saturn’s upper atmosphere. With this, the spacecraft’s mission is all set to when it enters the planet’s atmosphere and disintegrates. In its final hours, Cassini will relay as much data as it can back to Earth before it dies. NASA hopes the data collected from the final descent will allow scientists to understand more about the planet’s atmosphere and interior. New Horizons: The First Mission to the Pluto System and the Kuiper Belt

The New Horizons mission is helping us understand worlds at the edge of our solar system by making the first reconnaissance of the dwarf planet Pluto and by venturing deeper into the distant, mysterious Kuiper Belt – a relic of solar system formation.

The Journey

New Horizons launched on Jan. 19, 2006; it swung past Jupiter for a gravity boost and scientific studies in February 2007, and conducted a six-month-long reconnaissance flyby study of Pluto and its moons in summer 2015, culminating with Pluto closest approach on July 14, 2015. As part of an extended mission, pending NASA approval, the spacecraft is expected to head farther into the Kuiper Belt to examine another of the ancient, icy mini-worlds in that vast region, at least a billion miles beyond Neptune’s orbit.

Two mountain ranges on Pluto have been named after Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary respectively by the International Astronomical Union, which for the first time, has officially approved the naming of 14 features on the icy dwarf planet. These are the first geological features on the planet to be named following the close flyby by the New Horizons spacecraft in July 2015.

NASA to explore asteroid Bennu, OSIRIS-REx Mission was launched for this purpose.

Measure the Yarkovsky effect (a thermal force on the object) on a potentially hazardous asteroid and constrain the asteroid properties that contribute to this effect.

Asteroid: A relatively small, inactive, rocky body orbiting the Sun. Comet: A relatively small, at times active, object whose ices can vaporize in sunlight forming an atmosphere (coma) of dust and gas and, sometimes, a tail of dust and/or gas. Meteoroid: A small particle from a comet or asteroid orbiting the Sun. Meteor: The light phenomena which results when a meteoroid enters the Earth’s atmosphere and vaporizes; a shooting star. Meteorite: A meteoroid that survives its passage through the Earth’s atmosphere and lands upon the Earth’s surface.

CYGNSS - Cyclone global navigation satellite system

RESTORE - L SPECECRAFT

E. coli AntiMicrobial Satellite (EcAMSat) Investigating Space Microgravity Effects on Antibiotic Resistance of E. coli The E. coli AntiMicrobial Satellite (EcAMSat) mission will investigate space microgravity effects on the antibiotic resistance of E. coli, a bacterial pathogen responsible for urinary tract infection in humans and animals.

NASA launches 2 missions to explore nearest space U.S. space agency National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is all set to launch two missions to explore a little-understood area 60 miles (96 KM) above Earth’s surface. The missions are named GOLD and ICON.

The Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission will be launched aboard a commercial communications satellite in January 2018, and the designed spacecraft Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) will be launched later this year.

About the missions:

What are they? GOLD and ICON will team up to explore the ionosphere, a boundary area between Earth and the space where particles have been cooked into a sea of electrically- charged electrons and ions by the Sun’s radiation. These layers of near-Earth space are increasingly becoming a part of human domain as it is home to radio signals used to guide airplanes, ships and Global Positioning System satellites.

Goals: Among others, the missions’ goals is to measure how upper atmosphere changes in response to hurricanes and geomagnetic storms. GOLD will also explore how the upper atmosphere reacts to geomagnetic storms, which are temporary disturbances of Earth’s magnetic field set off by solar activity. The agency is hoping to find evidences for a theoretical model about El Nino’s repercussions on the ionosphere.

Orbits: The two missions are complementary. ICON in low-Earth orbit, at 350 miles (560 km) above Earth, flies through and just above the ionosphere, like a close-up camera. GOLD runs in geostationary orbit over the Western Hemisphere, 22,000 miles (about 35,398 km) above the planet’s surface. It will build up a full-disk view of the ionosphere and the upper atmosphere beneath it every half hour.

SPARCS

Context: Scientists are planning to launch a small telescope into the Earth’s orbit that will monitor the flares and sunspots of small stars to assess how habitable the environment is for planets orbiting them. The spacecraft is known as the Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat, or SPARCS.

About SPARCS:

SPARCS is a new NASA-funded space telescope and will be launched in 2021. The mission, including spacecraft design, integration and resulting science, is led by Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE).

The stars that SPARCS will focus on are small, dim, and cool by comparison to the Sun. Having less than half the Sun’s size and temperature, they shine with barely one per cent its brightness. The heart of the SPARCS spacecraft will be a telescope with a diameter of nine centimetres plus a camera with two ultraviolet-sensitive detectors to be developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Both the telescope and camera will be optimised for observations using ultraviolet light, which strongly affects the planet’s atmosphere and its potential to harbour life on the surface.

Background:

Astronomers have discovered that essentially every M dwarf star has at least one planet orbiting it, and about one system in four has a rocky planet located in the star’s habitable zone. This is the potentially life-friendly region where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for life as we know it, and liquid water could exist on the planet’s surface.

Since M dwarfs are so plentiful, astronomers estimate that our galaxy alone contains roughly 40 billion rocky planets in habitable zones around their stars. This means that most of the habitable-zone planets in our galaxy orbit M dwarfs.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (Tess), which is expected to find thousands of new exoplanets orbiting nearby stars, lifted off by SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in Florida. InSight is a robotic Mars lander designed to study the interior and subsurface of Mars, which would in turn help scientists to understand the Earth and Solar System history.

European Space Agency

Copernicus Earth Observation Programme (Sentinel families ) - 20 more satellite in orbit before 2030 LISA pathfinder: Space based gravitational wave observatory European Union’s new Sentinel-1 radar satellites will watch the changes in the shape of the ground and monitor every land volcano in the world. Gaia Space Probe: More than a billion stars mapped ROSETTA

Gaia is a space observatory of the European Space Agency designed for astrometry: measuring the positions and distances of stars with unprecedented precision.

CHINA

TANSAT SATELLITE - Monitor CO2 in the atmosphere.

China announced its plans to launch a lunar probe in 2018 to achieve the world’s first soft landing on the far side of the moon ( ‘South Pole-Aitken Basin’ ) to showcase its ambitious space programme. The mission is called Chang’e 4 project.

The BeiDou Navigation Satellite System is a Chinese satellite navigation system. BeiDou has been described as a potential navigation satellite system to overtake GPS in global usage, and is expected to be more accurate than the GPS once it is fully completed. The current third generation of BeiDou claims to reach millimeter-level accuracy (with post-processing), which is ten times more accurate than the finest level of GPS.

Facts for Prelims: List of Global Navigation Satellite Systems:

GPS of the United States of America. GLONASS or Global Navigation Sputnik System of Russia. Galileo of the European Union. IRNSS or NAVIC of India. Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS) of Japan.

The International Space Station (ISS) is a space station, or a habitable artificial satellite, in low Earth orbit. The ISS is now the largest artificial body in orbit. The ISS consists of pressurised modules, external trusses, solar arrays and other components. ISS components have been launched by Russian Proton and Soyuz rockets as well as American Space Shuttles. What is it for? The ISS serves as a microgravity and space environment research laboratory in which crew members conduct experiments in biology, human biology, physics, astronomy, meteorology and other fields. The station is suited for the testing of spacecraft systems and equipment required for missions to the Moon and Mars.

Orbit: The ISS maintains an orbit with an altitude of between 330 and 435 km by means of reboost manoeuvres using the engines of the Zvezda module or visiting spacecraft. It completes 15.54 orbits per day.

Joint project: The ISS programme is a joint project among five participating space agencies: NASA, Roscosmos, JAXA, ESA, and CSA. The ownership and use of the space station is established by intergovernmental treaties and agreements. The station is divided into two sections, the Russian Orbital Segment (ROS) and the United States Orbital Segment (USOS), which is shared by many nations.

ISS is the ninth space station to be inhabited by crews, following the Soviet and later Russian Salyut, Almaz, and Mir stations as well as Skylab from the US.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have for the first time identified microbes in space without having to samples back to Earth for tests.

James Webb Space Telescope Context: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope the world’s premier infrared space observatory of the next decade — has successfully completed critical testing in a massive thermal vacuum chamber, enabling it to function properly in the extremely cold and airless environment in space in 2019.

James webb space telescope:

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the largest space telescope ever built. It is an international collaboration between of about 17 countries including NASA, European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). When it is launched in 2019, it will be the world’s biggest and most powerful telescope.

When it is launched into space it will be able to peer back in time 3.5 billion years, teaching us more than ever before about the start of the universe. The telescope will be used to look back to the first galaxies born in the early universe more than 13.5 billion years ago, and observe the sources of stars, exoplanets, and even the moons and planets of our solar system.

ESA - NASA SOHO - Solar and heliospheric Observatory

Internal structure of the Sun