ASTROSAT Fully Assembled - ISRO's First Mission Operated As Space Observatory

Under the leadership of Mr. A S Kiran Kumar, the Chairman of Space Commission and ISRO, the organisation is gearing up for the launch of India's first ever astronomy mission named ASTROSAT, which is dedicated to the study of celestial objects. ISRO recently published on their official website that its spacecraft has been fully assembled and their plans would be executed as per schedule. Planned to be fired off in the later part of this year, this spacecraft will be onboard a PSLV C-34 when its blasted to the equatorial orbit, which is at a distance of 650 km from Earth. ASTROSAT would be conducting observations in the Ultraviolet (UV), optical, low and high energy X-ray wavebands simultaneously, once it reaches its destination. It is important to note here that this is the first mission by ISRO to be operated as a dedicated space observatory.

There have been many multi-wavelength observation campaigns in the past. However, very few sources have been studied over wide spectral band. And that has led us to a poor understanding of the underlying physical processes. A dedicated satellite such as ASTROSAT with several co-aligned instruments is the solution to all this. ASTROSAT can make it possible to understand high energy processes in binary & extragalactic systems, measure magnetic fields of neuron stars and even search for black hole sources in the galaxy.

This purpose driven observatory will focus on monitoring the X-Ray sky for new transients, studies of the periodic and non-periodic variability of X-Ray sources, simultaneous multi-wavelength monitoring of intensity variations in a broad range of cosmic sources, conducting sky surveys in hard X-ray and UV bands etc.


ISRO's ASTROSAT will be carrying 5 astronomy payloads:

1. Twin 40-cm Ultraviolet Imaging Telescopes (UVIT)
2. Three units of Large Area Xenon Proportional Counters (LAXPC)
3. A Soft X-ray Telescope (SXT)
4. A Cadmium-Zinc-Telluride coded-mask imager (CZTI)
5. A Scanning Sky Monitor (SSM)

The development of these payloads was done jointly by ISRO, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Raman Research Institute and Indian Institute of Astrophysics. Foreign help was also sought for development of two of these payloads. For that University of Leiscester, UK and Canadian Space Agency collaborated with ISRO.

The space & research organisation has informed that all these payloads and sub-systems are now successfully integrated to the satellite and the spacecraft has been tested ok by switching it on. All the parameters are normal and before sending it to the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota, over the next few weeks the spacecraft will be tested for electromagnetic interference and compatibility, acoustics, vibration and thermal vacuum.

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