English Essay on “India Enters The Space Age” complete Paragraph and Speech for School, College Students, essay for Class 8, 9, 10, 12 and Graduation Classes.
Rohini
Or
India’s Own Satellite
Or
India Enters The Space Age
A satellite is a rocket that runs round the Earth. Moon or other planets Rohini is an Indian satellite weighing 35 kilograms. It flies round the earth every 97 minutes. This satellite was launched on the morning of July 18, 1980. It was sent up by a rocket called SLV-3. It took 12 minutes for the four-stage rocket to put Rohini in its orbit around the earth.
With this, India became the sixth country in the world to acquire satellite launching capability. The earlier five were U.S.S.R. the United States. France, China and Japan.
The Rohini satellite was designed to orbit the earth for 100 days. but observers claimed that it might actually stay up for at least nine months. This was the result of its achieving a higher orbit than planned originally.
The 22.7 meters rocket weighed 17 tones. It did a perfect take off from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh. The satellite had been designed by the Indian Space Research Organization. Dr. S.Dhawan, the Chairman of ISRO had said that the rocket and the satellite was conceived, designed and built by the Indian scientists. The import content was a mere 15 per cent of the total equipment. The latest models in computer were employed to beam signals from the satellite.
The launching of Rohini was a great achievement for India. Though Rohini was India’s third satellite, it was the first to be launched from the Indian soil using an Indian vehicle. The first two Indiansatellites, Aryabhatta and Bhaskara, had been launched from U.S.S.R. by U.S.S.R. vehicles.
The SLV project cost the Government Rs. 205 million. The first two stages had metal casting. The third and fourth stages used fibre glass. The fuel efficiency was compared to the best in the world. The Indian scientists had developed the technology within two years. as against ten years anticipated by the French scientists.
There were 44 major sub-systems in the SLV-3. Nearly seven thousand electric parts had been used in the vehicle.
With the launching of ROHINI India began harnessing space technology for such diverse purposes as domestic telecommunication, radio and television broadcast, mineral exploration, meteorology, study of land use, maritime communications, hydrological mapping, evaluation of forest resources, crop forecast and monsoon studies.
The launching of SLV-3 was the culmination of two decades of space research in India. India first started launching sounding rockets from Thumba in Kerala to study the atmosphere round the Equator. A rocket launching pad had been set up later at Sriharikota for launching bigger rockets India had so far fired some one thousand rockets from Thumba and Sriharikota, for various studies. Over five hundred of these rockets had been designed and fabricated by Indian engineers.
The military significance of the project was obvious. The success of India’s satellite launch meant that India now had the capability of launching Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBM)— flying bombs which destroy far off cities in other countries.