GSAT-7, INDIA'S FIRST MILITARY SATELLITE, LAUNCHED

GSAT-7, INDIA'S FIRST MILITARY SATELLITE, LAUNCHED

GSAT-7, India’s first full-fledged military communication spacecraft, meant for exclusive use by the Navy, was launched on Friday morning from Kourou in South America on a European Ariane 5 launcher.

India's advanced multi-band communication satellite, GSAT-7, was successfully launched at 0200 hrs IST today (August 30, 2013) by the Ariane-5 launch vehicle of Arianespace from Kourou, French Guiana. Ariane-5 precisely placed GSAT-7 into the intended Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO) after a flight of 34 minutes 25 seconds duration. 

As planned, ISRO's Master Control Facility (MCF) at Hassan in Karnataka started acquiring the signals five minutes prior to the separation of GSAT-7 from Ariane-5 launch vehicle. The solar panels of the satellite have been deployed and they are generating power. Initial checks have indicated normal health of the satellite.
The present orbit of the satellite will be raised to Geostationary Orbit of about 36,000 km altitude through three orbit raising manoeuvres by firing of GSAT-7's Liquid Apogee Motor (LAM). Preparations are underway for the first firing, planned in the early hours of August 31, 2013. The satellite will be placed in the Geostationary Orbit by Sep 04, 2013.

The satellite is expected to give a big boost to the country’s maritime security and intelligence gathering in a wide swath of the Indian Ocean region.

Built to the Navy’s multiple-band requirements as platform to safely link up its ships, submarines, aircraft and command from land in real time, it is ISRO’s latest communication satellite.

Until now the defence forces have used minuscule capacities on ISRO’s various INSAT/GSAT satellites.

It will be doubly empowered when its sibling, GSAT-7A, follows it in 2014-15 at the earliest; it is said to share some of the GSAT-7A resources with the Air Force and the Army.

For the Navy, this is part of a long-term modernisation plan involving the use of satellites and information technology.

In recent years successive Chiefs of Naval Staff have identified space-based communications as the core of the Navy’s futuristic network-centric operations.

To be placed over 74 degrees East longitude in the coming days, the 2,650-kg satellite is designed to enable communication in four frequency bands ranging from the lower UHF (ultra high frequency) to the higher Ku bands, along with the rare S band and the commonly used C band.

It provides a decent slice of 15 mHz of the premium S-band for MSS (mobile satellite services); the S-band is now the preserve of the military and strategic State users including All India Radio.

The UHF has never been used until now in an Indian communication satellite; this gives the user (Navy) a long sweep of intelligence network, or what it calls COMINT/ELINT, on moving non-land platforms like ships.

The Ku band allows high-density data transmission, including voice and video. A special ground infrastructure has also been put in place for GSAT-7.