ISRO's Once 'Naughty Boy', Now Tamed, Will Mark Hundredth Rocket Launch

India is gearing up for a milestone rocket launch. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) is ready to launch its one-hundredth big rocket from India's only rocket port at Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh.

If all goes well on January 29 early morning, ISRO will hit a century in space for India's rocket launches. The rocket Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle F-15 (GSLV F-15) is ready at the second launch pad and it will launch an Indian navigation satellite into space.

The first big rocket to liftoff from Sriharikota was the Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV) on August 10, 1979, and now nearly 46 years later the Department of Space is ready to hit a century. Till now all big rocket launches at Sriharikota have been by the Indian government.

This rocket was once dubbed as the 'naughty boy' of ISRO since it gave the Indian space agency the worst time of all its menagerie of rockets. Of 16 launches so far, there have been six failures for this rocket, which is a huge 37 per cent failure rate. In comparison, India's latest 'Bahubali' rocket - Launch Vehicle Mark-3 - has a one hundred per cent success rate.

It is also a rocket from the same family where India showed its innate skill of mastering the making of cryogenic engines, a technology the country took two decades to master after the technology transfer of the same was denied to India by Russia under pressure from the USA.

ISRO said that GSLV-F15 is the 17th flight of India's Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) and the 11th flight with an indigenous cryogenic stage. It is the 8th operational flight of a GSLV with an indigenous cryogenic stage and the 100th Launch from India's Spaceport Sriharikota. GSLV-F15 payload fairing is a metallic version with a diameter of 3.4 meters.

The GSLV-F15 with an indigenous Cryogenic stage will place the NVS-02 satellite into a Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit and the launch will take place from the Second Launch Pad (SLP) at Satish Dhawan Space Centre.

Navigation with Indian Constellation (NavIC) is India's independent regional navigation satellite system designed to provide accurate Position, Velocity and Timing (PVT) service to users in India as well as to regions extending about 1500 km beyond Indian land mass.

NavIC will provide two types of services, namely, Standard Positioning Service (SPS) and Restricted Service (RS). NavIC's SPS provides a position accuracy of better than 20 meters and a timing accuracy of better than 40 nanoseconds over the service area.

NavIC has given India its own share of challenges since it was born out of the very bad experience the country had after the 1999 skirmish with Pakistan at Kargil. In that conflict, India was denied access to high-quality Global Positioning System (GPS) data and the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee promised to make a swadeshi version of the GPS for India's strategic community.

Now on its hundredth launch, ISRO hopes that the early challenges posed by the navigation satellites and the rocket are a thing of the past and it hopes to hit the hundredth mark in style.