After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, ISRO carried out its first launch on November 7, Saturday. It launched the EOS-1 Earth observation satellite and nine smaller payloads into orbit.
As reported by Spacenews, the launch was scheduled for late 2019 but got delayed due to COVID-19. The PSLV-C49 lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center, Sriharikota at 4:42 a.m. Eastern Time on the day. The EOS-01 Earth observation satellite got successfully injected into a 575-kilometer circular orbit after about 16 minutes.
Roughly weighing 628-kilogram, EOS-01 is part of ISRO’s RISAT series of SAR satellites. It is a synthetic aperture radar satellite with all-weather and day-and-night observation capability. The intended applications of EOS-1 are agriculture, forestry and disaster management.
The nine rideshare payloads included four satellites from Kleos Space of Luxembourg. Along with that, four Lemur small sats for American company Spire and the Lithuanian R2 technology demonstrator were also inserted into their intended orbits.
