In a landmark achievement, India today successfully launched the EMISAT satellite into orbit, alongside 28 other nano satellites from other countries.
ISRO's four-stage PSLV-C45 rocket was used to put the satellites into three different orbits, a first for India.
ISRO
EMISAT alone weighs about 436kg, and was put into orbit at a height of 749km by the PSLV rocket. All of the other satellites on board the launch vehicle however were from a number of different countries.
Lithuania had two nanosatellites on board, with another one each from Spain and Switzerland. A majority of the others were from the US, with four nanosatellites for a cloud analytics company, and another 20 as part of an Earth-observation network by private company Planet.
EMISAT is an intelligence satellite aimed specifically at electromagnetic measurement. Aside from being able to collect topographical imagery for defence and research purposes, it's also supposedly capable of detecting enemy communication systems by uncovering their transmission frequencies, as well as the presence of radar and other sensors along the border.
This satellite joins a handful of others controlled by the Indian military, among the 47 satellites in operation over India.
That's not all the launch achieved either. The fourth stage of the rocket, which remains in orbit, will act as a platform for research organisations and the like to perform microgravity experiments.
To that end, it hosts an Automatic Identification System (AIS) from ISRO, an Automatic Packet Repeating System (APRS) from AMSAT India (Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation), and an Advanced Retarding Potential Analyzer for Ionospheric Studies (ARIS) from the Indian Institute of Space Science and technology (IIST).