Mighty India Power

Taking another step towards meeting the shortfall of transponders for satellite TV and other communication needs, the Indian Space Research Organisation(ISRO) launched GSAT-10 from French Guiana on Saturday. The 3,400-kg GSAT-10, India’s heaviest satellite till date, was launched on an Ariane-5 rocket and carried 30 communication transponders. ISRO’s master control centre at Hassan in Karnataka will manoeuvre it in its final geo-stationary orbit, alongside Insat-4A and the GSAT-12, over the next few days. GSAT-10 is the ninth Indian communication satellite in space. “After a smooth countdown lasting 11 hours and 30 minutes, the Ariane-5 launch vehicle lifted off right on schedule. After a flight of 30 minutes and 45 seconds, GSAT-10 was injected into an elliptical Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit, very close to the intended one,” ISRO said after the launch. “Preliminary checks on various subsystems of the satellite were performed and all parameters were found satisfactory. Following...

The Indian Space Research Organisation is gearing up to launch 58 missions in the next five years, informed ISRO Chairman K Radhakrishnan. In a press conference held here on Monday to discuss ISRO’s future plans, Radhakrishnan said two of the future missions would be commercial. “India’s first 50 space missions were achieved in 27 years and the next 50 in 10 years -- between 2002 and 2012. Our aim now is to undertake 58 missions in five years,” he said. Radhakrishnan said the budget for the current year was Rs 6,700 crore, 36 per cent of which would be allocated for launch vehicles, 55 per cent for communication, remote sensing and navigation satellites and 9 per cent for science missions like Astrosat, Mars Orbiter and Aditya. He said the missions would include PSLV C20 with Saral satellite, which would be assembled in 20 days at Sri Harikota with the tentative launch date fixed for December 12. GSAT 7 and INSAT 3D, which were communications and meteorology satellites, were almost c...

  The telecom ministry has drawn up an ambitious blueprint to build a supercomputer by 2017, which will be at least 61 times faster than any machine available on Monday. Telecom and information technology minister Kapil Sibal has written to PM Manmohan Singh about the project, which is estimated to cost Rs. 4,700 crore over the next five years. But in order to succeed, the scientists behind the project will need to defy predictions of experts across the world that the computing speeds Sibal has promised are impossible any time in the near future. "In his (Sibal's) letter, he has said that C-DAC has developed a proposal with a roadmap to develop a petaflop and exaflop range of supercomputers in the country with an outlay of Rs. 4,700 crore," a government official said, referring to the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) which built India's first supercomputer, the PARAM 8000 in 1991. A petaflop is a measure of computing speed and...

Advanced Systems Laboratory (ASL) is the deceptively bland name that obscures from public view the Defence Research & Development  Organisation’s (DRDO’s) most glamorous laboratory. At the DRDO missile complex here in Hyderabad, ASL develops the ballistic missiles that, in the ultimate nuclear nightmare, will carry Indian nuclear weapons to targets — thousands of kilometres away. Foreign collaboration is seeping into many areas of R&D, but ASL’s technological domain — the realm of strategic ballistic missiles — is something that no country parts with, for love or for money. No foreigner would ever set foot in ASL. But Business Standard has been allowed an exclusive visit. The erudite, soft-spoken director of ASL, Dr V G Sekharan, describes the technologies that were developed for the DRDO’s new, 5,000-kilometre range Agni-5 missile, which was tested flawlessly in April. He reveals nothing except restraint stood between India and an intercontinental ballistic miss...