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Bangalore’s tryst with space exploration

Divya Gandhi

Chandrayaan catapulted Bangalore into the nerve centre of India’s deep space programme

— Photo: K. Murali Kumar

Moon mission: The 32-metre antenna for tracking the Chandrayaan-1 programme at Byalalu village. The programme has placed Bangalore in an exclusive international league.

Bangalore: It is hard to imagine that the story of space research in Bangalore began in a row of musty industrial sheds in Peenya. Especially so when set in contrast to the celebrated images of India’s lunar satellite Chandrayaan-I soaring into space, tracked keenly by the state-of-the-art Indian Deep Space Network (IDSN).

As Indian Space Research Organisation’s three successive chairpersons reminisce about the unstoppable ambition that fired the space organisation’s early years and talk about its future trajectory, it becomes clear why the frenetic activity around India’s first satellite Aryabhata converged in Bangalore. And now, nearly 40 years on, ISRO’s most ambitious mission, Chandrayaan-I, has catapulted the city into the nerve centre of India’s deep space programme.Bangalore nearly lost out to Hyderabad in the race to be ISRO’s base, recalls U.R. Rao, who took over from Satish Dhawan as ISRO Chairman in 1984. “But the city had an unbeatable edge,” he says. “ISRO could draw from a vibrant cluster of science, Defence and educational institutes in the city, which made both these satellites — and the 45 other Indian satellites in between — a reality,” he says.

If the expertise of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc.), Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), Bharat Electronics Limited, National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL) and the Electronics and Radar Development Establishment came to the aid of Aryabhata, Chandrayaan-I too benefited from a host of Bangalore-based institutes and industries.

“The main structure of the spacecraft was assembled in HAL and several industries helped in the fabrication of electronic and mechanical components for Chandrayaan and also for the IDSN,” says M. Annadurai, Project Director, Chandrayaan. The IISc. also played a crucial role in providing departmental support, he added.

K. Kasturirangan, Director of National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) and the former Chairman of ISRO recollects how this synergy made it possible to complete Aryabhata in record time by a small group of 250 scientists whose average age was 25 years. With pressure mounting on them to meet a 36-month deadline set by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the group was high on energy, even if low on infrastructure, working as they did from industrial sheds in Peenya.

“It was no joke. We had to marshal resources, manpower and infrastructure. It was this interface with institutes and industry that made it possible,” Dr. Kasturirangan said. This centre in Peenya, called the Indo Soviet Satellite Project (now ISAC, the lead centre for satellite technology), moved 10 years later to its current location near NAL from where the INSAT and IRS series were rolled out. There was no stopping the space programme.

Forty years on, the community is 4,000 strong — and Chandrayaan is the result of five state-of-the-art ISRO outfits in the city. ISRO headquarters joined ISAC, followed by the Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre, which develops liquid and cryogenic propulsion stages for launch vehicles, and Regional Remote Sensing Service Centre. And finally last year, the ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) expanded to Byalalu where the giant antennae and IDSN’s tracking capability, have placed Bangalore in an exclusive international league.

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