ISRO

For a country transporting rockets on bicycles as late as 1963, the envisioning of her own Space Research Organization in 1969 was a revolution in itself for India. Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) which was found as an independent space program under the stewardship of Jawaharlal Nehru and the brilliant scientific mind, Vikram Sarabhai, has been making great strides internationally. Its headquarters are in Bangalore (Bengaluru) and it operates through a countrywide network of centres. Thus while sensors and payloads are developed at the Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad, satellites are designed, developed, assembled and tested at the U. R Rao Satellite Centre (formerly the ISRO Satellite Centre) in Bangalore. Launch vehicles are developed at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram while launches take place at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on Sriharikota Island, near Chennai. The Master Control Facilities for geostationary satellite station-keeping are on the other hand, located at Hassan and Bhopal. ISRO’s commercial arm is Antrix Corporation, which has its headquarters in Bangalore. So through a veritable interconnected network, ISRO has been operating and evolving since its inception.

ISRO’s first satellite, Aryabhatta, was launched by the Soviet Union on April 19, 1975. After five years, on July 18, 1980, Rohini, the first satellite to be placed in orbit by an Indian-made launch vehicle (the Satellite Launch Vehicle 3), was launched.  Since then, ISRO has launched several space systems, including the Indian National Satellite (INSAT) system for telecommunication, television broadcasting, meteorology, and disaster warning as also the Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) satellites for resource monitoring and management. ISRO subsequently developed three other rockets for putting satellites into polar orbit, for placing satellites into geostationary orbit, and a heavy-lift version of the GSLV. Those rockets launched communications satellites, Earth-observation satellites, and, in 2008, Chandrayan I–India’s first mission to the Moon. Incidentally, this premium Space Research organization plans to put Indian astronauts into orbit in 2021. ISRO indeed had been a source of great national pride giving flight to popular imagination ever since former Indian Air Force Pilot Rakesh Sharma’s dream odyssey into space in 1984 as the first and only Indian citizen till date.