ISRO postpones launch of imagery satellite GISAT-1 due to technical snag

“The launch of GISAT-1 on board GSLV-F10, planned for today, is postponed due to technical reasons. Revised launch date will be informed in due course,” the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) saidin a statement.

The city-headquartered space agency, however, did not elaborate on the technical reasons that forced the postponement of its first launch this year from Sriharikota.

The 2,268 kg “state-of-the-art agile” Geo Imaging satellite that would operate from geostationary orbit, was tipped to continuously observe land, ocean and atmospheric parameters at high resolution and send near real time images of earth immediately unlike remote sensing satellites which would take at least 14 days.

It was earlier planned for launch on board GSLV-F10, which is equal to the height of a 16-storey building, at 5.43 pm on Thursday from the second launch pad of Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota, over 100 kilometres from Chennai.

Scientists at ISRO for the first time designed the Geo- Stationary Launch Vehicle with a four-metre diameter ogive shaped payload fairing (which houses the satellite) to accommodate a larger spacecraft.

Though India already has a number of earth observation satellites, these generally operate from low earth orbits covering a relatively smaller region at a given time. Since sectors like meteorology and disaster management require imaging large areas of earth and atmosphere very frequently, GISAT-1 was planned to be put in the geostationary orbit for seamless observation of land, ocean and atmospheric parameters at a relatively higher resolution.

According to the space agency, GISAT-1 will facilitate near real-time observation of the Indian sub-continent, under cloud-free condition, at frequent intervals.

The previous launch by ISRO in 2020 was telecommunication satellite GSAT-30 was from French Guiana by Ariane-5VA-251 rocket in January.

In December 2019, ISRO launched the RISAT-2BR, an enhanced vision of a radar imaging satellite RISAT-2B. The postponed launch would have been the 14th flight of GSLV, eighth mission equipped with indigenous cryogenic upper stage and 76th launch vehicle missionfrom Sriharikota.