India will launch a heavy communication satellite Gsat-30 on January 17 from Kourou space centre in French Guiana on board an Ariane-5 rocket of the European Space Agency (Arianespace), ISRO chief K. Sivan said on Wednesday.
“The launch of Gsat-30 from Kouru will be our first satellite in the New Year (2020) to augment capacity to provide communication links to state-run and private service providers,” the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman told reporters here.
The Paris-based Arianespace launched the space agency”s Gsat-31 on February 6, 2019, with 1-2K bus structure to provide communication services from geo-stationary orbit in Ku-band for 15 years.
Sivan also said: “We are planning to have 25 launches this year, including Aditya-L1 satellite, which will be inserted in a halo orbit around the Lagrangian point (L1), about 1.5 million km from the earth.
Aditya will study the solar corona, which is the outer layers of the sun, extending to thousands of km above the disc (photsphere or corona).
“The corona has more than a million degree Kelvin temperature, which is higher than the solar disc temperature of 6,000K. How the corona gets heated to such high temperatures is still an unanswered question in solar physics,” said ISRO in a statement earlier.
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