Bangalore, Oct. 18: Aryabhata, India’s first satellite, has completed six months in orbit to-day, with 2,740 orbits round the earth and staying in space for over 4,300 hours. In a review of its performance, the Indian Space Research Organisation claimed that the Aryabhata project had fulfiled its objectives. Nearly 80 per cent of the tasks had been achieved. The accomplishments of the project, the lessons learnt and knowledge gained were “milestones” in India’s progress towards technological self-reliance. In the last six months, about 500 commands had been successfully transmitted to Aryabhata from the Sriharikota and Moscow ground stations and a number of experiments carried out had provided “most useful” information on tracking which would be helpful for the earth observation satellite which was to follow Aryabhata. It is expected now that Aryabhata will function in space for about two years although the original expectation was that it would have an active life of about six months. Aryabhata’s slower than expected spin decay had shown that the structure of the satellite and its systems were exceptionally clean, magnetically.” So far, only one-sixth of the gas on board had been used up for spinning the spacecraft which meant that instead of respinning being carried out once every 25 days, Aryabhata would require to be spun up once every six months. In retrospect, the functioning of Aryabhata and the ground stations had been more than satisfactory, ISRO said here to-day. In spite of the hitch in the power supply system the first few days rof operation had given some useful information from two of the scientific experiments.
Published – October 20, 2025 12:17 am IST
