Status
Success
METSAT-1
Thu Sep 12, 2002 10:23 UTC
India's first launch to GTO. Improvements including a lighter carbon composite payload adapter resulted in an increase in theoretical GTO performance from 1050 to 1200kg.
Rocket
Mission Details
MetSat-1 (Kalpana-1)
Kalpana-1 was the first dedicated meteorological satellite launched by the Indian Space Research Organisation using the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV). The satellite is three-axis stabilized and is powered by solar panels, getting up to 550 watts of power. The METSAT bus was used as the basis for the Chandrayaan lunar orbiter mission of 2008.
Originally known as MetSat-1, the satellite was the first launched by the PSLV-C4 into the Geostationary orbit. On February 5, 2003, it was renamed to Kalpana-1 by the Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in memory of Kalpana Chawla—a NASA astronaut who perished in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.
Kalpana-1 went out of service in mid-2018.