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India created history on Thursday when NASA launched a satellite made in the country. Only this one was not made by the experienced brains at ISRO. The satellite was a tiny, 64 gram device named KalamSat, after the late President of India, APJ Abdul Kalam, and was designed and built by an 18-year-old student and his friends.

Rifath Farook, hailing from Tamil Nadu’s Pallapatti, designed and built the tiny satellite by 3D printing the parts. The satellite is built with a carbon fibre frame and Farook said that he wanted to demonstrate the performance of 3D printed carbon.

The satellite was developed as part of Farrok’s enrollment in NASA’s ’Cubes in Space’ program, which encouraged kids raning from 11 to 18 years of age across the world to design and build a satellite that fit in the palm of the hand. Farook’s efforts were funded and sponsored by an organisation called ’Space Kids India’, whose CEO, Dr. Srimathy Kesan took a personal interest in the project, guiding the students through the design and construction of the satellite.

Kesan called the launch a ’Divine Intervention’ in an interview with TOI. "I am calling it divine intervention because the previous Nasa mission from Wallops got postponed because of weather and we were able to launch successfully today." This one-of-its-kind satellite, which can be held in one’s palm is a 3.8cm cube and its structure is fully 3-D printed with reinforced carbon fiber polymer. It is equipped with a nano Geiger Muller counter which will measure radiation in space. Added".

"It is the only cube to be converted into a satellite in this mission," she added.

ISRO successfully launches PSLV-C38 carrying Cartosat-2 series satellite

Marching another step forward in the space technology, The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Friday successfully launched PSLV-C38 rocket carrying 712 kg Cartosat-2 series, a remote sensing satellite.

The rocket took off from the first launch pad at Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) at 9.29 am from the spaceport of Sriharikota, about 100 km from the north off Chennai.

The PSLV-C38, which is also carrying 29 co-passenger satellites, injected the satellites including Cartosat-2 series into the required orbit.

Soon after the launch, ISRO chairman Chairman A.S.Kiran Kumar said Cartosat-2 series launch mission was successful. He congratulated the entire ISRO team which worked hard for the launch mission.

This will be the seventeenth flight of PSLV in ’XL’ configuration (with the use of solid strap-on motors).

The primary Cartosat-2 series satellite is a remote sensing satellite, After its injection into the required orbit, the satellite will be brought to operational configuration following which it will begin providing regular remote sensing services using its panchromatic and multispectral cameras.

The imagery sent by the satellite will be useful for cartographic applications, urban and rural applications, coastal land use and regulation, utility management like road network monitoring, water distribution, creation of land use maps, change detection to bring out geographical and man-made features and various other land information system as well as geographical information system (GIS) applications.

The co-passenger satellites comprise 29 Nano satellites from 14 countries such as Austria, Belgium, Chile, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, United Kingdom, and the United States of America as well as one Nano satellite from India.

The total weight of all these satellites carried on-board PSLV-C38 is about 955 kg.