PSLV-C7 Successfully placed the satellites into the orbits

India's maiden attempt to place four satellites into the orbits went successfully early today.The PSLV placed the two Indian , one Indonesian and the Argentina satellites in to the orbits.The success should have given boost to the Indian Space Scientists, who are preparing for the Chandrayan Mission that is planned to take place early next year.

Placing the foreign satellites will help us in generating revenue to carry out further space experiments.Among all the satellites the one which is of more interest to me is the SRE-1 - Space capsule Recovery Experiment Vehicle.The payload of this is about 550 kg and the main intention is to observe the situations under micro gravity conditions.This is will orbiting for around two weeks before it is brought back to Earth.As per ISRO before entering the Earths atmosphere it will be placed in an Elliptical orbit.The vehicle is indigenously made to withstand the atmospheric changes it undergoes as soon as entering the Earth's atmosphere.It uses a parachute mechanism to bring down the vehicles speed, before it is made to fall into the Bay of Bengal sea[some 140 km away from the Sriharikota Andhra Pradesh].The SRE is so made that is can float on the water before it is identified by the recovery department.
This all is going to happen in the coming 2 weeks and hope the SRE-1 experiment will provide valuable inputs that will be useful to the ISROs unmanned expedition to the Lunar Surface and the Manned expedition to the space.Finally if all this goes as expected , India will be fourth country to have recovered the space object after USA,Russia and China.

For complete Information about all the Satellites carried by the PSLV-C7 refer this PDF form ISRO
Image Source ISRO

Chandrayan - Now with a purpose

In 2003, India announced its mission to Moon.The then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said a Moon flight would showcase India's scientific capabilities.India considered funding this space program to be a matter of prestige.The mission was named Chandrayan and planned to execute it in 2008 or so.Now in Dec 2008,ISRO has added one more objective to its mission, Possibility of bringing Helium-3 to Earth and use it for energy production.The advantage behind the Helium-3 is its non-radio active behaviour due to the presence of 2 protons and 1 neutron[instead of two].So the fuel from it will be environment friendly.Earth has very minute amounts of Helium-3 in natural form.Whatever is available now,comes as a byproduct of other chemical reactions.When it comes to Moon it exists in abundance in the topsoil of the moon, where solar winds from the sun have deposited it for billions of years.A rough calculation says 30 metric tons of this isotope of Helium could generate as much electricity as the United States consumes in one year.Millions of tons of this isotope is available on the Moons surface.

With most of the fossil fuels nearing extinction ,USA,Russia and China have already realised the importance of this resource and have expressed their interst over this untapped resource.USA made a step forward and showed signs of establishing a reactor on the Moon's surface to extract the Helium-3,before to is sent to Earth for use.Just a few kilograms of fuel could produce gigawatts of electricity.Now India wants to utilse its Chandrayan trip to explore the possibility of utilising this invaluable resource.With this India too joined the race with USA,Russia and China for Helium-3 on the Moon.Hope the research will yeild positve results.