Chennai: The 25.5 hour Countdown for tomorrow’s exclusive commercial launch of PSLV-C56 carrying Singapore’s DS-SAR satellite and six co-passenger satellites commenced at the spaceport of Sriharikota on Saturday morning.
The 44.4 m tall four-stage vehicle PSLV-C56, with a lift off mass of 228 tonnes, will take off from the First Launch Pad at 06.30 hrs on Sunday morning from the SHAR Range.
ISRO said the countdown began at 0500 hrs on Saturday morning. ISRO tweeted, “The countdown leading to the launch on July 30, 2023, at 06:30 Hrs. IST has commenced.”
During the countdown, propellant filling operations will be carried out in the four stage vehicle.
PSLV-C56 is configured in its core-alone mode, without the strap-on motors, similar to that of C55.
It would launch DS-SAR, a 360 kg satellite into a Near-equatorial Orbit (NEO) at 5 degrees inclination and 535 km altitude.
PSLV-C56/DS-SAR, is the dedicated commercial mission of NewSpace India Limited (NSIL) for ST Engineering, Singapore.
DS-SAR, a Radar Imaging Earth Observation satellite is the primary satellite. In addition to this, there are six co-passenger customer satellites, also belonging to Singapore.
“All the satellites would be injected into 535 km circular with 5 orbital inclination”, ISRO said.
This is the 58th flight of PSLV and 17th flight of its Core Alone configuration. About 21 minutes after the lift off, and the ignition and separation of all the four stages, the primary satellite DS SAR will get separated from the Launch vehicle and injected into the orbit.
It would be followed by the separation and injection of the six co-passenger satellites–Nulion, ORB-12 STRIDER, Galassia-2, SCOOB-II, Arcade and VELOX-AM –in that order in a span of four minutes.
The entire mission is expected to last 25 minutes. After injecting all the satellites, the upper stage (4th stage) of the rocket would be placed in lower orbit to ensure its reduced orbital life.
“PS4 will be de-orbited to Low Earth circular orbit 300 x 300 km, using left out propellants to reduce orbital life of the spent PS4 stage”, ISRO said.
