The 143-foot, 700-ton-plus rocket blasted off from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, according to ISRO.
The three-stage vehicle was propelled by an Indian-designed and developed cryogenic engine — CE-20 — in its upper stage (C25 stage) before it ejected the satellite into its orbit, according to a report on the Times of India website. GSAT-19’s propulsion system will be later to put the satellite in its geostationary orbital position.
The first experimental flight of LVM3, the LVM3-X/CARE mission was launched in December 2014.
The GSAT-19 carried transponders and a geostationary radiation spectrometer. It will monitor the nature of charged particles and the influence of space radiation on satellites and their electronic components, according to the ISRO.
The vehicle has two solid strap-ons, a core liquid booster and a cryogenic upper stage. GSLV Mk III is designed to carry 4-ton class of satellites into geosynchronous transfer orbit or about 10 tons to low earth orbit, the ISRO posted on its website.
In February, the space agency put 104 micro satellites into orbit in a single launch. The Indian rocket industry is competing for commercial launches with space agencies in Europe and Japan, and with private companies such as Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin LLC, Bloomberg reported in November.
