ISRO’s Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) mission failed

ISRO’s Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) mission failed two days earlier. Now the Agency is trying to find out what happened with the rocket.

On Christmas day the agency primarily speculated whether it was the collapse of an actuator or the breaking of the first stage connectors that led to the second consecutive failure of the (GSLV), but the scientists thinks that the five days are too much to identify the defect which was initially occurred on December 20. When a minor leakage was made in one of the valves of Russian cryogenic engine as identified, the GSLV mission has been delayed till December 25.

ISRO’s sources told the media that when a leakage in the upper stage cryogenic engine (the last stage engine that takes the capsule moving the satellite to its pre-arranged site in space) was blocked, an overall check of the first stage, too, should have been conducted to make sure a successful launch. A scientist, who is involved with the mission said, five days were not sufficient to sort out all the problems; certainly we ignored the real problem at first stage. thrust

The GSLV-F06 rocket, carrying the higher Rs125 crore GSAT-5P communication satellites needed force and turned off course hardly 50 seconds after the 4.04pm lift-off on December 25, forcing the scientists at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota to press the self-destruct button and explode the satellite. This happened 63 seconds after lift-off.

On March 28, 2001, the first attempt of launching the GSLV program was also ended in a second before taking off due to a severe problem. 21 Days later on April 18, 2001 the program was reorganize and successfully launched mark the beginning of India’s GSLV series of launchers. Then the problem was the lack of thrust due to poor plumbing of the four first stage strap-on engines.

Prof UR Rao, former ISRO chairman and current chairman of governing council of Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), Ahmedabad, told that everything had been checked and that the problem occurred seconds after the launch, catching the scientists unawares. He said “the actuator appears to have futile to collect commands from the onboard computer of the rocket. The actuators are connected with the rocket motor, the failure of which may have caused GSLV-F06 to turn off course and break up.

He added “that there are numbers of pages of data relating to a few seconds after the lift-off that the scientists must have to study. Then we can only reach at the specified problem that caused to terminating the mission”.