How PSLV was tailored to launch a satellite into a Geosynchronous transfer orbit?
PSLV was tailored to launch METSAT aka Kalpana-1, India's first exclusive Meteorological satellite, METSAT, into a Geo-synchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO).That was the first time a PSLV was used to launch a satellite into GTO. It was the seventh flight of PSLV [C-4]. PSLV is meant for launching satellites into the Low-Earth orbit and Polar orbits. It has proved itself as a reliable workhorse for putting resource satellites into the polar sunsynchronous orbit. In an innovative venture, ISRO engineers successfully modified a PSLV for launching a weather satellite into the geostationary orbit. The METSAT mission in which the weather satellite, later named Kalpana-1, was launched, has revealed how the efficiency of a rocket can be optimised and tailor-made for a different mission.The challenge was clear. A PSLV’s orbital injection velocity is 7.5 km a second. A GSLV needs a velocity of 10 km a second to take a satellite to a height of about 36,000 km at. one end of the - oval-shaped orbit...