India's satellite launch fails after technical fault in PSLV rocket
The launch of the PSLV-C60 rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India. PHOTO: AFP
Listen to article
India's attempt to place a surveillance satellite into orbit failed on Sunday after its launch vehicle encountered a technical issue, the country's space agency has confirmed.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said the PSLV-C61 rocket, carrying the EOS-09 Earth observation satellite, experienced a drop in chamber pressure during its third stage, preventing the mission from achieving its objective.
"During the third stage, there was a fall in the chamber pressure of the motor case, and the mission could not be accomplished," ISRO Chairman V Narayanan said. 'We are studying the entire performance and will share findings soon.'
The satellite was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, early on Sunday. The failure marks a rare setback for ISRO, which is globally recognised for its cost-effective and increasingly ambitious space programme.
This is only the third failure involving India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) since its debut in 1993, underscoring the vehicle's otherwise reliable record.
A Failure Analysis Committee is expected to investigate the malfunction, local media reported.
Despite this setback, India has made major strides in space exploration. In 2014, ISRO became the first Asian agency to place a spacecraft in orbit around Mars. Last year, it became the fourth nation to land a spacecraft on the Moon, joining the ranks of Russia, the US and China.
ISRO has launched satellites for several countries and continues to play an increasingly prominent role in the global space sector.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Express Tribune
3 days ago
- Express Tribune
Climate action could save vanishing glaciers
More than three-quarters of the world's glaciers are set to vanish if climate change continues unchecked, a major new study warned on Thursday, fueling sea-level rise and jeopardizing water supplies for billions. Published in Science, the international analysis provides the clearest picture yet of long-term glacier loss, revealing that every fraction of a degree in global temperature rise significantly worsens the outlook. It may sound grim, but co-lead author Harry Zekollari, a glaciologist at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and ETH Zurich, told AFP the findings should be seen as a "message of hope." Under existing climate policies, global temperatures are projected to reach 2.7 degrees Celsius (4.9F) above pre-industrial levels by 2100 -- a pathway that would ultimately erase 76 percent of current glacier mass over the coming centuries. But if warming is held to the Paris Agreement's 1.5C target, 54 percent of glacial mass could be preserved, according to the study, which combined outputs from eight glacier models to simulate ice loss across a range of future climate scenarios. "What is really special about this study is we can really show how every tenth of a degree of additional warming matters," co-lead author Lilian Schuster of the University of Innsbruck told AFP. The paper's release comes as Swiss authorities monitor flood risks following the collapse of the massive Birch Glacier, which destroyed an evacuated village. While Swiss glaciers have been heavily impacted by climate change, it remains unclear how much the latest disaster was driven by warming versus natural geological forces. Glaciers are found on every continent except Australia — from Mount Kilimanjaro to the Austrian Alps and the Karakoram range in Pakistan. While most are clustered in the polar regions, their presence in mountain ranges across the world makes them vital to local ecosystems, agriculture and human communities. Vast bodies of snow, ice, rock, and sediment that gain mass in winter and lose it in summer, glaciers formed in the Earth's deep past when conditions were far colder than today. Their meltwater sustains rivers critical for farming, fisheries, and drinking water.
Express Tribune
3 days ago
- Express Tribune
China launches first space mission to retrieve asteroid samples
An artistic concept of Tianwen-2 spacecraft near an asteroid. PHOTO: ORBITAL TODAY WEBSITE Listen to article China embarked on Thursday on its first mission to retrieve samples from a nearby asteroid, with the nighttime launch of its Tianwen-2 spacecraft, set to make the fast-growing space power the third nation to fetch pristine asteroid rocks. The decade-long mission is the latest in recent space efforts that include landing robots on the moon's far side, running a national space station in orbit and investing heavily in plans to send humans to the moon by 2030. The Long March 3B rocket lifted off at about 1:31 a.m. from the Xichang satellite launch center carrying the Tianwen-2 robotic probe. Over the next year it will approach the small near-Earth asteroid 469219 Kamoʻoalewa, which is between 9 million miles and 24 million miles (15 million km and 39 million km) distant. China's official news agency Xinhua confirmed the launch of Tianwen-2, calling it a "complete success". Tianwen-2 is set to reach the asteroid in July 2026 and shoot a capsule packed with rocks back to Earth for a landing in November 2027. Then it will fly to its second target, main-belt comet 311P/PanSTARRS, on a journey lasting years, as the comet's closest distance to Earth is about 87 million miles. Located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, Comet 311P is far closer to the Sun than the region where typical comets originate. The odd location makes it unlikely to have the surface ice of typical comets that, once vaporised, forms their characteristic tails. Tianwen-2 will make in-depth studies of the main features of Kamoʻoalewa and 311P, including possibly the material ejected by the latter, an official of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said. Returning samples from Kamo'oalewa will be far more challenging than China's successful lunar missions, mainly because the asteroid's gravity is much lower than that of the moon, making landing and sampling much harder. Japan's Hayabusa, which fetched samples from a small asteroid in 2010, was the world's first such mission, followed by its Ryugu mission of 2019. In 2020, the first US asteroid retrieval mission, OSIRIS-REx, brought back samples from the Bennu asteroid. Kamoʻoalewa is known as a quasi-satellite of Earth, a close celestial neighbour that has orbited the sun for roughly a century, NASA says. Its size is anywhere between 120 feet and 300 feet (40 m and 100 m). Tianwen-2's predecessor, Tianwen-1, another uncrewed spacecraft launched in 2020, was China's first mission to Mars, successfully landing on a vast plain known as Utopia Planitia after a six-month journey. China is already planning its third interplanetary mission, Tianwen-3, scheduled tentatively for 2028, which could make it the first country to retrieve samples from Mars. Last month CNSA announced payload capacity of 20 kg (44 lb) for foreign countries and research institutions aboard the orbiter and lander that will explore the red planet.
Express Tribune
5 days ago
- Express Tribune
2017 OF201, new dwarf planet beyond Pluto, discovered: How it could change the way we look at solar system map
Astronomers have just unveiled an extraordinary discovery in the far reaches of the solar system that could dramatically change the way we view our cosmic neighbourhood. A new dwarf planet, temporarily named 2017 OF201, has been located in a distant orbit far beyond Pluto. The object, which may be a distant cousin of Pluto, has an orbital path so vast that it takes an incredible 25,000 Earth-years to complete one revolution around the sun. To put this into perspective, Pluto's orbit around the sun takes 248 years. At its furthest distance, 2017 OF201 is more than 1,600 times farther from the sun than Earth, with even its closest approach being still 44.5 times the distance from Earth to the sun. RPG NEWS: Scientists discovered a mysterious new world beyond Pluto, potentially rewriting the solar system's map. This icy world, temporarily named 2017 OF201, is a distant cousin of Pluto. At its farthest, it's over 1,600 times Earth's distance from the sun; at its closest,… — RPG The Random Post Generator (@JimmyMcSqueezle) May 26, 2025 The discovery was announced by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center on May 21, 2025, following extensive research led by Sihao Cheng, a researcher from the Institute for Advanced Study. Cheng, along with a team of Princeton University graduate students, found the new dwarf planet while searching for a theoretical "Planet 9," a hypothetical world beyond Neptune that may be influencing the behaviour of objects in the outer solar system. Using advanced computer programs, the team sifted through years of images captured by the Victor M. Blanco Telescope in Chile and the Canada France Hawaii Telescope. By identifying bright moving spots in the sky, they were able to pinpoint the location of 2017 OF201. This distant world could potentially qualify as a dwarf planet, with an estimated size of 435 miles in diameter, placing it in a similar category to Pluto. Despite its distance, the object's discovery challenges the prevailing notion of an empty outer solar system. What makes 2017 OF201 particularly interesting is its orbit. Unlike most trans-Neptunian objects, which follow more uniform orbits, 2017 OF201's highly eccentric path raises questions about how it ended up so far out in the solar system. One theory suggests it could have been flung into its wide orbit after encountering a giant planet, such as Neptune or Jupiter. 🚨 New dwarf planet candidate: 2017 OF201 🚨 ~700 km wide, now 90.5 AU from the Sun. Orbit: a = 838 AU, q = 44.9 AU — deep into the inner Oort Cloud. Possibly part of a hidden population totaling ~1% of Earth's mass. 📄 Paper: #dwarfplanet — Tony Dunn (@tony873004) May 22, 2025 Alternatively, the object may have originated in the mysterious Oort Cloud, a theoretical region of icy bodies surrounding the solar system, before it was ejected and later returned. In fact, the discovery of 2017 OF201 suggests that the Oort Cloud, long considered a faint and distant region of space, may actually host a much larger number of objects than previously thought. This revelation could also indicate that other objects similar in size and orbit to 2017 OF201 are lurking out there, waiting to be discovered. Cheng remains optimistic about the potential for more discoveries in this distant region of space. "The presence of this single object suggests that there could be another hundred or so other objects with similar orbit and size," Cheng said. "They are just too far away to be detectable right now." This finding adds another layer of complexity to our understanding of the solar system's outer boundaries. It also raises questions about the very nature of distant space exploration. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which made history by sending back detailed images of Pluto and its moons in 2015, is currently journeying beyond the Kuiper Belt, the region where Pluto resides. However, even New Horizons has yet to reach the outermost reaches of the solar system, suggesting that there may be far more out there to discover. The discovery of 2017 OF201 comes at a time when scientists are reevaluating the structure of the solar system. Researchers have long speculated about the existence of Planet 9, an elusive object that could be responsible for the odd clustering of distant objects in the outer solar system. However, the unusual orbit of 2017 OF201 raises doubts about the existence of Planet 9, suggesting that its gravitational effects may not be as pronounced as previously believed. As astronomers continue to study 2017 OF201 and similar objects, they may uncover new insights into the formation and evolution of our solar system. With the vastness of space still largely unexplored, this discovery is just one more reminder of the mysteries that lie beyond our current understanding. The findings are detailed in a paper that has been made available on the arXiv preprint server, offering further insights into this groundbreaking discovery.
