PM Modi congratulates ISRO and India’s space industry for the successful launch of PSLV-C49/EOS-01 Mission today.
“I congratulate @ISRO and India’s space industry for the successful launch of PSLV-C49/EOS-01 Mission today. In the time of COVID-19, our scientists overcame many constraints to meet the deadline,” PM said in a tweet.
Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has on Saturday successfully launched its latest earth observation satellite (EOS-01) onboard the PSLV-C49 launch vehicle from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh’s Sriharikota.
The space agency has also launched nine satellites from customer nations.
This is the space agency’s first launch since a nationwide coronavirus lockdown.
According to ISRO, EOS-01 is a highly advanced earth observation satellite intended for use in supporting agriculture, forestry and disaster management planning.
An earlier launch of the GSAT-30 telecommunication satellite was completed in January, but that was from a base in French Guinea.
The launch took place at 3.12 PM after a 26-hour countdown. The launch was delayed by 10 minutes due to bad weather and debris in the flight path, ISRO sources told news agency PTI.
“This mission is very special and unusual for ISRO. The space activity cannot be done from ‘work from home’. Each engineer has to be present at the lab. When talking about missions like these, each technician, employee has to work together,” said ISRO Chief K Sivan.
At 3.34 pm ISRO said the customer satellites had separated and been injected into their intended orbits.
Six minutes earlier, ISRO said India’s EOS-01 satellite had separated from the fourth stage of the PSLV rocket and been injected into orbit.