Photo Credit: ANI
On Saturday, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully launched the Earth Observation Satellite-8 (EOS-8) from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh. The space agency also placed the SR-O DEMOSAT satellites into their designated orbits. This mission marked the successful completion of ISRO’s third and final developmental flight of the Small Satellite Launch Vehicle-D3 (SSLV-D3), which carried the EOS-08.
The SSLV-D3 rocket took off gracefully from the first launch pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, located approximately 135 km east of Chennai, at precisely 9:17 a.m.
The mission’s goals included designing and developing a microsatellite and creating payload instruments that are compatible with the microsatellite bus, as stated by the Bengaluru-based space agency.
EOS-08, built on the Microsat/IMS-1 bus, carries three key payloads: the Electro Optical Infrared Payload (EOIR), the Global Navigation Satellite System-Reflectometry payload (GNSS-R), and the SiC UV Dosimeter.
The EOIR payload is designed to capture images in the Mid-Wave Infrared (MIR) and Long-Wave Infrared (LWIR) bands, both day and night, for various applications including satellite-based surveillance, disaster monitoring, environmental assessment, fire detection, volcanic activity monitoring, and disaster monitoring for industrial and power plants.
The GNSS-R payload demonstrates how GNSS-R-based remote sensing can analyze ocean surface winds, assess soil moisture, study the Himalayan cryosphere, detect floods, and identify inland water bodies.
The SiC UV Dosimeter is used to monitor UV irradiance at the viewport of the Crew Module for the Gaganyaan Mission and functions as a high-dose alarm sensor for gamma radiation.
