Megha-Tropiques
| Megha-Tropiques | |
|---|---|
| Type: | Earth observation satellite |
| Country: |
 India / France
|
| Operator: |
 ISRO / CNES
|
| COSPAR-ID : | 2011-058A |
| Mission dates | |
| Dimensions: | 1000 kg |
| Begin: | October 12, 2011, 05:31 UTC |
| Starting place: | Satish Dhawan Space Center |
| Launcher: | PSLV -C18 |
| Orbit data | |
| Track height: | 865 km |
| Orbit inclination : | 20 ° |
Megha-Tropiques is an earth observation satellite owned by the Indian ISRO and the French CNES .
It was placed into low- earth orbit on October 12, 2011 at 05:31 UTC by a PSLV- C18 launcher from the Satish Dhawan Space Center . The three nanosatellites VesselSat-1 , Jugnu (3 kg, IIT Kanpur) and SRMSat (10.9 kg, SRM University of Chennai) were also on board . VesselSat-1 weighs 28.7 kg, was built at Luxspace in Luxembourg and is intended to identify and track ships on the world's oceans using the international Automatic Identification System .
The three-axis stabilized satellite is equipped with an imaging nine-channel microwave radiometer MADRAS (Microwave Analysis and Detection of Rain and Atmosphere Systems, CNES and ISRO), the multispectral radiometer ScaRaB (Scanner for Radiation Budget, CNES), the Radio Occultation Sounder for the Atmosphere (ROSA , Italy) and the six-channel microwave measuring device SAPHIR (Sondeur Atmosphérique du Profil d'Humidité Intertropicale par Radiometry, CNES) and is intended to monitor the weather in the tropical regions and in particular the radiation budget, the reflection behavior of cloud cover and the energy distribution in the tropical convection system . The name of the satellite is derived from this: Megha (Sanskrit) means clouds, Tropiques (French) stands for tropics. It was built on the basis of the Indian satellite bus IRS and has a planned service life of three years.