What was given up as dead, turned out to be alive! The one that sprang a recent surprise was India’s first IIT-made student satellite, Jugnu, a product of the students and staff of IIT-Kanpur.
The three-kg student satellite was launched on October 12, 2011, along with SRMSat of SRM University in Chennai and VesselSat-1 of Luxembourg. The main satellite was the Indo-French Megha-Tropiques.
Speaking to TOI from Kanpur on Friday chief co-ordinator of Jugnu, NS Vyas, said that the mission life of the satellite was one year. “We had stopped tracking it. But when we came to know from the Nitte Amateur Satellite Tracking Centre in Bengaluru that it was after all still alive we were thrilled,” he said.
Vyas said that while its signals were still strong, some of its internal functions had, however, weakened.
Explaining how Jugnu was tracked, Sankar Dasiga, co-ordinator of satellite projects of the Bengaluru-based Nitte Meenakshi Institute of Technology, said that on April 9 while he and his team were monitoring the tracking centre located on the third floor of the college premises they noticed a signal.
“It was at 11.33am and 48 seconds and when we studied the signal we were surprised to find that it was from Jugnu which everyone thought had stopped operating and was dead. But, to our delight and surprise its heart was still beating and we were extremely happy. We tracked it clearly and we knew it was Jugnu, because the signal carried its name. We were five of us at that moment in the tracking centre when the signal from Jugnu flashed saying that it was alive,” he said.
The Jugnu transmission lasted for less than a second and during this brief moment all the data was available. “After this date, Jugnu has now been added to our regular tracking list. After April 9, we have not tracked the next signal. But, our expectation is that it will transmit at regular periodicity when the satellite’s on-board is strong enough,” he said.
Dasiga said that his team alerted Isro and IIT-Kanpur.
The event in a way is reminiscent of Nasa’s Mars rover, Spirit, landing on the Red Planet in January 2004. A few days after the dramatic touchdown, it stopped communicating with the flight controllers at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California and was given up as dead. But, then it sprang a surprise by once again responding to signals.
On February 25, 2013 the Nitte satellite tracking center received signals from a UK-made student satellite, STRand-1 which was placed in orbit along with six other satellites by Isro. The main satellite was the Indo-French Saral, and the rocket was the highly-proven four-stage Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle.
By Srinivas Laxman
This article can be read here.
