In what will be a feather in the cap of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, Pratham — the first satellite designed and developed by its students— is set to be launched by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) at Sriharikota on September 26.
Conceptualised in 2008 with an aim of making the IIT Bombay a center for space science and technology research, the satellite is designed to fit within a cube of 30 cm, with a weight of nearly 10 kg.
The objective behind designing Pratham was to empower the students involved with the skill set required to develop a satellite through various stages of designing, analysis, fabrication and testing.
Another aim of this project was to start collaboration among various Indian universities interested in contributing to the space sector and sharing of knowledge and facilities between them. “Pratham was a first step towards that goal. The team involved in the development of Pratam has held several workshops and sessions have been conducted by the team in IIT Bombay and other universities as well,” an IIT-B spokesperson said.
According to the spokesperson, the initiative taken by the IIT-B has resulted in successful completion of ground-stations for satellite tracking in quite a few colleges.
For instance, Atharva College of Engineering. IIT Bombay collaborated with a few international universities like UCl (london) and IPGP (Paris) too.
“For the relevance of our satellite to the student community, IIT Bombay will be transmitting satellite data when it passes over India so that any interested university with a small ground station will not only be able to detect the beacon signal from our satellite but will also be able to measure Total Electron Counts (TEC) above their ground station. This will help to spread awareness among the student community about this exciting field,” the spokesperson said.
The objectives of Pratham’s mission include: to acquire knowledge in the field of satellite and space technology, to have a satellite entirely designed by the student body of IIT Bombay, to have the satellite launched, measure TEC of the Ionosphere above India and Paris and to involve students from other universities in our satellite project.
“When the satellite works successfully for its mission life of four months in space, the project will become a complete success. Students will need two months of data to validate it against known standards. IIT Bombay team plans to acquire two months of additional data that it can claim as its own and correct. The design life of the satellite comes from the quality of the components used in the satellite,” the sp0kesperson said.
The different stages of design in increasing order of maturity are conceptual design, preliminary design and critical design. After each phase is completed by the team, a review is conducted in ISRO to assure a quality progress of the project.