OCEANSAT-2 To Be Launched by ISRO in August OCEANSAT-2

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will be launching its second ocean monitoring satellite in August, along with six European nano satellites.

Satish, ISRO's director (Publications and Public Relations), said that 952-kg OCEANSAT-2 would be an in-orbit replacement to OCEANSAT-1 and will be injected by the stripped down or core alone version of ISRO's workhorse rocket Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C14) in the same polar sun-synchronous orbit of 720 km. The intended orbit with the wide swath of the satellite’s footprint will allow observation of the same area of the ocean every two days.

OCEANSAT-2 will be used for identification of potential fishing zones, sea state forecasting, coastal zone studies, weather forecasting, and climate studies. Apart from the ISRO-developed Ocean Colour Monitor (OCM) and a Ku-band pencil beam Scatterometer, the satellite will also have a Radio Occultation sounder for Atmospheric Studies (ROSA), developed by the Italian Space Agency.

The Scatterometer with a ground resolution of 50km x 50km is expected to provide accurate information on wind speed and direction. The eight-band OCM with 360 metres spatial resolution and a swath of 1,420 km will provide information about the same area every two days.

According to Satish, the rocket will be launched from ISRO's rocket launch centre at Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh near here.

The designed life span of OCEANSAT-2 will be five years but the actual usage may go beyond that as happened with OCEANSAT-1, which was launched in 1999 but is still working.

ISRO will not decommission OCEANSAT-1. The satellite will be void once its components start dying. Piggy backing on OCEANSAT-2 will be six nano satellites from Europe, together weighing 25 kg.