About VSSC and TERLS

Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre is the lead Centre for development of satellite launch vehicles and associated technologies in India. The Centre pursues active research and development in a host of distinct technology domains like aeronautics, avionics, composites, etc with a view to achieve self-reliance in the high tech realm of launch vehicle technology.

The center had its beginnings as the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) in 1962. It was renamed in honor of Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, the father of the Indian space program. VSSC is surrounded by the villages of Veli to the south, Kulathoor to east, and Pallithura to the north.

The Vikram Sarabhai Space Center is one of the main Research & Development establishments within ISRO. VSSC is an entirely indigenous facility working on the development of sounding rockets; Rohini and Menaka launchers; ASLV, PSLV and GSLV, along with the solid-fuel motor program.

Wikipedia
Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikram_Sarabhai_Space_Centre)
Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thumba_Equatorial_Rocket_Launching_Station)

Official Website (http://www.vssc.gov.in/internet/)

VSSC From Google Earth:)

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The massive campus of VSSC from Google Earth. It's the view from about 13800 ft above. Also the Imaginary date is 2003. It's too old.

VSSC has its own contributions in the continuing expansion of space applications programmes like village resources centres, tele-medicine, tele-education, disaster management support and outreach through direct-to-home television, India’s first mission to Moon- Chandrayaan-1, etc. Thus the Centre is agog with activities that continue to pursue successful goals on all fronts in meeting the larger objective: achieving self-reliance in space technology and its applications for national development.

Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Trivandrum, which is the lead Centre for development of satellite launch vehicles, is responsible for RESPOND programmes in the areas of aerodynamics, aerothermal, aerospace structures, composites, propulsion, propellants, polymers, chemical, control & guidance, simulation, avionics, mechanical design, fabrication, integration, aerospace mechanisms, robotics, etc. In addition, VSSC has high level of expertise in the areas of conventional and non-conventional analytical techniques, non-destructive testing etc. A partial list of new research proposals in these areas, which are of immediate relevance to ISRO’s activities, is available now.

Link (http://www.vssc.gov.in/internet/getPage.php?page=Projects%20Page&pageId=221)

History as on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thumba_Equatorial_Rocket_Launching_Station)
In 1962, the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) was established. Homi Bhabha, then the father of India's nuclear program, along with Vikram Sarabhai, took into consideration number of sites situated in Kerala to construct a rocket station. After long discussion they both finalized Thumba as the appropriate place. Thumba is a small village, until then, known only for fishing situated near the Thiruvananthapuram airport in Kerala.

The newly built rocket launching pad was set amidst coconut groves. A local Catholic church, the St Mary Magadelene's Church served as the main office for the scientists. The bishop's house was converted into a workshop. A cattle shed became the laboratory in which the young Indian scientists worked on the first sounding rockets. Upon launching the first sounding rocket (Nike-Apache) on 21 Nov 1963, Prof. Sarabhai shared with his team his dream of an Indian Satellite Launch Vehicle. Over the next 12 years, the United States, Britain, France and the USSR helped India build and launch more than 350 sounding rockets from Thumba.

More details on Topnews.in
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Source (http://www.topnews.in/journey-thumba-thumba-equatorial-rocket-launching-station-279155)

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Link (http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/nov/20spec.htm)

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Link (http://isro.gov.in/isrocentres/iisu.aspx)

Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre (LPSC)
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Link (http://isro.gov.in/isrocentres/lpsc.aspx#thiruvananthapuram)

Thiruvananthapuram - Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology(IIST)

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Link (http://isro.gov.in/isrocentres/iist.aspx)

A Part of VSSC taken from train. The part of the campus were pic is taken is marked on the map.
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Intoduction of ISRO in their website (http://www.isro.org/scripts/Aboutus.aspx)

After the successful launch of the monsoon research satellite, Megha-Tropiques (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-15270790), from Sriharikota; one of the "team" is proceeding back to VSSC,Thiruvananthapuram

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Shot "somehwere" ;) in Tamilnadu

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Thiruvananthapuram: The Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) at Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) here has resumed the monthly launch of sounding rockets to conduct studies of the upper atmosphere.

A press note issued by VSSC here said RH200 sounding rockets would be launched from TERLS every month.

The first launch in the series took place on Wednesday evening.

The station had been launching sounding rockets regularly on the third Wednesday of every month. However, over the years, the launches were conducted based on need.

Atmospheric behaviour

The station is involved in scientific experiments to study atmospheric behaviour using balloons and sounding rockets. This includes university collaboration programmes where student payload experiment programmes and rocket development programmes are undertaken, according to the press note.

The monthly launches will be of interest to scientists, students, and to the general public who can visit the Space Centre.

For permission to witness the launch, contact Ph: 0471 – 2565666.

Source (http://www.hindu.com/2011/05/20/stories/2011052050810200.htm)

Its 21th November 1963. A beautiful day with clear skies. History is about to be created at the small coastal village of Thumba in Thiruvananthapuram. A bicycle carrying a cone-shaped contraption trundles onto the sandy beach.A small team of budding scientists soon gets down to business. Among them is a frail young man with long hair.Its none other than our Former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

Read more here (http://t.co/wshI4a1A)

India tests missile capable of reaching China

read through (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-04-19/india-tests-missile-capable-of-reaching-china/3960644)

The Trivandrum touch for the above news read below

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Source (http://news.keralakaumudi.com/news.php?nid=37c98c11995eaea83b84e19c93d6993a): Keralakaumudi

^^ - India has now entered a most rarefied list of nations who possess the most strategic of defense technologies, and Trivandrum has played and will continue to play a critical role in this.

If the State Government has any sense, it would set up an Aerospace and Defence Park, with Brahmos Aerospace and ISRO as anchor tenants. With a plethora of defence projects from the various versions of the Brahmos supersonice cruise missile, the Agni series and the new Rafale fighter aircraft up for grabs, in addition to civilian projects such as the proposed indigenous airliner project, Trivandrum and Kerala stand to create an attractive alternative to Bangalore. The presence of Southern Air Command, ISRO, IISST, IISER, the International Airport and the deep-water port will all act as key catalysts.

The are large Government owned parcels near the NH-66 and the M.C.Road that could be readily used for this purpose.

^^ - India has now entered a most rarefied list of nations who possess the most strategic of defense technologies, and Trivandrum has played and will continue to play a critical role in this.

If the State Government has any sense, it would set up an Aerospace and Defence Park, with Brahmos Aerospace and ISRO as anchor tenants. With a plethora of defence projects from the various versions of the Brahmos supersonice cruise missile, the Agni series and the new Rafale fighter aircraft up for grabs, in addition to civilian projects such as the proposed indigenous airliner project, Trivandrum and Kerala stand to create an attractive alternative to Bangalore. The presence of Southern Air Command, ISRO, IISST, IISER, the International Airport and the deep-water port will all act as key catalysts.

The are large Government owned parcels near the NH-66 and the M.C.Road that could be readily used for this purpose.

Rajivgandhi Aviation technology and Air India Express Engineering HQ will be a catalyst for the above . Any way the Aerospace project is already underway.

AEROSPACE CENTRE

A host of new initiatives have also been announced for the city, among which is an Aerospace Centre to be established here in association with Keltron and VSSC. For the project, Rs.10 crore has been allocated.
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Thiruvananthapuram/article3012552.ece

Rajivgandhi Aviation technology and Air India Express Engineering HQ will be a catalyst for the above . Any way the Aerospace project is already underway.

+1 - W.r.t the MRO and RGAA but the "aerospace project" announced in Sri Mani's recent wish-list budget is most likely to be smoke-and-mirrors like a lot of other items on his list. It makes no mention about land acquisition and, at best, is likely to be a joint facility to develop and/or manufacture electronics components, which is likely to benefit KELTRON far more than ISRO.

What is needed is for KINFRA or KSIDC to assemble a 200-odd acre parcel which can be then allocated to public sector aerospace players such as Brahmos and ISRO, as well as to private industries in the same sector. Considering the evident lack of enthusiasm or progress about KSIDC's Life Sciences Park near Technocity, it may as well be converted to this purpose although there are plenty of Government owned parcels in the vicinity for this purpose if the Government chooses to do so.

There was a proposal (http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2007-07-27/news/27687392_1_kerala-plans-defence-sector-state-industries-minister) under the previous LDF Government to establish a Defence manufacturing park, in conjunction with the Union Defence Minister (who has been the notable exception in actually bringing projects to his home State!) but that seems to have sunk without a trace. Even if the proposal is resurrected, given the current political environment, I'd be surprised if the choice of location is Trivandrum even if it is the one that logic dictates.

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RISAT- 1 will be an eagle eye on

India’s first Radar Imaging Satellite – RISAT- 1 (scheduled launch 5:47 am Thursday) will be an eagle eye on the peninsula, beaming data 24X7 for five years on crucial areas such as national disasters.

Dr. V. Adimurthy, dean at Indian Institute of Space, Science and Technology in Valiyamala, who was at Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR at Sriharikota, told Deccan Chronicle.

Around 3,000 experts at different centres of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), especially Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), and National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) have been working for the PSLV – C19.

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Indian Space Research Organisation has built a supercomputer, which is to be India's fastest supercomputer in terms of theoretical peak performance of 220 TeraFLOPS (220 Trillion Floating Point Operations per second). The supercomputing facility named as Satish Dhawan Supercomputing Facility is located at Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram. The new Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) based supercomputer named "SAGA-220" (Supercomputer for Aerospace with GPU Architecture-220 TeraFLOPS) is being used by space scientists for solving complex aerospace problems. The supercomputer SAGA-220 was inaugurated by Dr K Radhakrishnan, Chairman, ISRO today at VSSC.

"SAGA-220" Supercomputer is fully designed and built by Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre using commercially available hardware, open source software components and in house developments. The system uses 400 NVIDIA Tesla 2070 GPUs and 400 Intel Quad Core Xeon CPUs supplied by WIPRO with a high speed interconnect. With each GPU and CPU providing a performance of 500 GigaFLOPS and 50 GigaFLOPS respectively, the theoretical peak performance of the system amounts to 220 TeraFLOPS. The present GPU system offers significant advantage over the conventional CPU based system in terms of cost, power and space requirements. The total cost of this Supercomputer is about Rs. 14 crores. The system is environmentally green and consumes a power of only 150 kW. This system can also be easily scaled to many PetaFLOPS (1000 TeraFLOPS).

This info is a bit old,but it is worth knowing.When ever media criticizes Mr. G Madhavan Nair for the so called azhimathi he has done,they should not forget the good things he has done to the nation.

Source : (http://www.isro.org/pressrelease/scripts/pressreleasein.aspx?May02_2011)

IIST Student-designed rocket launched successfully (http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/industry-and-economy/article3415518.ece)

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Thiruvananthapuram, May 13: The Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station here has launched ‘Vyom,' the first sounding rocket designed and realised by students.

B Tech students of Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (lIST), Thiruvananthapuram, designed the sounding rocket.

EXPERT GUIDANCE

Experts at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) here and faculty members of IIST provided guidance and supervision. Infrastructure support was made available.

The main objective of the launch was to flight test the solid motor and the accelerometer payload developed for the project, a spokesman for VSSC said.

The objectives were satisfactorily met in the maiden launch, he said, and the rocket reached the expected altitude.

He added that 26 undergraduate students, including 10 alumni of the 2007 batch who are at present scientists/engineers in ISRO centres, actively contributed.

A steering committee comprising IIST-VSSC mentors reviewed the preliminary design of the rocket.

The respective launch vehicle design review teams of ISRO cleared the design of all subsystems.

PROVEN PROPELLANT

Vyom had an overall length of 2.3 meters, maximum outer diameter of 207 mm and a lift-off mass of 88 kg.

It used solid motor with ISRO's proven hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene propellant, with a new grain configuration conceived by the students.

The payload was a tri-axis accelerometer designed by the students under the guidance of the VSSC's advanced technology vehicle and sounding rockets project.

It works on a low 5-V power supply and a low-cost power switching module and uses S-band antenna transmission system.

WELL-TRAINED

VYOM has helped students to learn many lessons, much beyond what is written in text books on rocket propulsion, aerodynamics and flight dynamics, payloads, manufacturing, integration and launch operations and above all the concepts of systems engineering and the spirit of team work.

They were also exposed to the rigour and the openness of ISRO's design reviews, test and evaluation standards and strict adherence to quality norms followed.

Thus, the spokesman said, students have been well-trained to take up the challenges they are going to take up in different ISRO centres.