Indian Space Research Organisation

Overview

ISRO designs and operates satellites for communications, broadcasting, weather, cartography and remote sensing, and builds the rockets that carry them. It also runs the ground segment: tracking stations, control centres and the data pipelines that turn satellite passes into imagery and services.

The agency is unusual among national space programmes in the weight it puts on applications. Communication satellites serve television and telephony, remote sensing satellites support agriculture and disaster response, and the satellite navigation system NavIC and the GPS augmentation system GAGAN are built for civilian use over Indian territory and beyond.

It is administered by the Department of Space, which reports to the Prime Minister, and the chairman of ISRO is also the secretary of that department and the chairman of the Space Commission.

Milestones

1. 1962The Indian National Committee for Space Research is set up on the recommendation of Vikram Sarabhai.
2. 1963The first sounding rocket is launched from Thumba, near Thiruvananthapuram.
3. 1969The organisation is renamed ISRO on 15 August.
4. 1972A Space Commission and the Department of Space are created, placing ISRO under their purview.
5. 1975Aryabhata, India's first satellite, is launched with Soviet assistance.
6. 1980The SLV-3 rocket places the Rohini satellite in orbit, making India a launch capable nation.

Launch vehicles

The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle became the workhorse of the programme. In February 2017 a single PSLV flight placed 104 satellites in orbit, most of them small foreign craft, which demonstrated the release mechanism as much as the rocket.^[4]

The Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle carries heavier communication satellites, and its Mark III variant, now called LVM3, is the vehicle chosen for the crewed Gaganyaan programme. The Small Satellite Launch Vehicle was added for compact payloads.^[1]

Heavy payloads still leave on foreign rockets, which is why the agency has worked towards a heavier indigenous launcher and towards its commercial arm, NewSpace India Limited, which sells launch and satellite services.^[7]

Deep space and human spaceflight

• Chandrayaan-1 (2008) orbited the Moon and carried instruments that confirmed water molecules on the lunar surface.
• Mars Orbiter Mission (2013 launch, 2014 arrival) reached Mars orbit on the agency's first attempt, at a fraction of the cost of comparable missions.
• Chandrayaan-3 (2023) landed near the lunar south pole, making India the first country to land in that region.
• Aditya-L1 (2023) is a solar observatory stationed at the Sun and Earth Lagrange point L1.
• Gaganyaan is the crewed orbital programme. A pad abort test of the crew escape system ran successfully in 2018, a Human Space Flight Centre was announced in 2019, and astronaut candidates began training in Russia.^{[2][3][4][5][6]}

The agency has also stated ambitions for an Indian space station and for a Venus orbiter, both of which remain programme proposals rather than committed missions.^[7]

Military and national use

Some ISRO capacity serves national security users. The GSAT-7A communications satellite, launched in December 2018, is used by the Indian Air Force to link its ground stations, aircraft and radar network, which the agency and the press described at the time as a dedicated military communications asset.^[8]