ASTROSAT

All you want to know about ASTROSAT.

'' India's first space Observatory''

Launch.
Scheduled to be launched by end of September and in early October from Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota.

About.
It's 1,650-kg spacecraft would orbit Earth equatorially at 650 km and study distant stars, galaxies,
black holes and other cosmic objects.

Elite status.
The space-based observatory was built at the ISRO Satellite Centre here to operate for five years and will provide useful data for the country's astronomy community. It will put India in an elite orbit with the U.S.,Europe, Russia and Japan.

Ready to Launch.
Spacecraft has been assembled and switched on. All the [six] payloads and sub-systems are integrated into the satellite. Mechanical fit checks of the satellite with the PSLV [polar satellite launch vehicle] payload adaptor have been performed successfully,”

Astrosat would be the first such satellite to scan simultaneously the sky in most of the frequency spectra from ultraviolet to optical and low- and high-energy X-ray bands.

Large scale
Although previous national satellites carried small astronomy-related devices, “Nothing on this scale, with a dedicated satellite, has been done before [at ISRO]. It should be of immense benefit to our scientists, who have depended on inputs from other agencies and sources like the Hubble [US-European space telescope].

In the coming days, Astrosat will undergo a host of
- environmental tests
-electromagnetic interference,
-electromagnetic compatibility,  thermal vacuum, vibration and acoustics and so on.

6 Payloads.
ISRO developed the six payloads in partnership with the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai; the Indian Institute of Astrophysics and the Raman Research Institute, Bengaluru; and the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune.

Two payloads were developed with the Canadian Space Agency and the University of Leicester, U.K.

Astrosat will be a proposal-driven general purpose observatory, with main scientific focus on:
- Simultaneous multi-wavelength
monitoring of intensity variations in a broad range of cosmic sources

Major Focus.
-Monitoring the X-ray sky for new
transients
-Sky surveys in the hard X-ray and UV bands
-Broadband spectroscopic studies of X-ray binaries, AGN, SNRs, clusters of galaxies and stellar coronae
-Studies of periodic and non-periodic variability of X-ray sources
-Astrosat will carry out multi-wavelength observations covering spectral bands from radio, optical, IR, UV, X-ray and
-Gamma ray regions both for study of specific sources of interest and in survey mode.