ISRO gears up for Megha-Tropiques launch

Updated on: Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Indian Space Research Organisation is giving final touches for the launch of Megha-Tropiques, an Indo-French advanced tropical climate monitoring satellite, expected to be carried out from the Sriharikota spaceport in a couple of weeks.
   
ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan is slated to announce tomorrow the date for the launch of the joint mission of ISRO and French space agency CNES.
   
Megha-Tropiques (Megha meaning cloud in Sanskrit and Tropiques denoting tropics in French), which would investigate the contribution of water cycle in the tropical atmosphere to climate dynamics, would be launched by ISRO's workhorse rocket PSLV.
 
ISRO has built the Megha-Tropiques satellite, which is similar to the Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) satellites.
 
Besides Megha-Tropiques, the PSLV will launch three nano satellites one from Luxembourg, "Jugnu" research satellite designed by IIT-Kanpur and a third one to monitor greenhouse gases from SRM University, Chennai.
 
A few days ago, Thales Alenia Space delivered to ISRO the flight model of the Radio Occultation Sounder for the Atmosphere (ROSA), which would be integrated into Megha-Tropiques.
 
The ROSA instrument is composed of a GPS receiver and two dual frequency antennas to pick up signals through the atmosphere.

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