Harish Palaniappan's

Look forward to this guy making some news in January & February 2007.

Above is a satellite, Space Capsule Recovery Experiment(SRE) that the indian space research organization (ISRO) has planned to launch coming january 10th 2007...alongwith with 3 other satellites, from the same launch vehicle PSLV -C7 (Polar satellite launch vehicle -level C7)

The SRE experiment:
Indians are trying to catch up a wee bit of space technologies like 'space-to-earth rentry' which the Americans have known for two decades now. ISRO is making this SRE experiment to understand and test its technologies of satellite or object rentry into earth's atmosphere.

The SRE is planned to be put in an orbit for a week or may be a month, and then commanded and manoevered to re-enter earth, navigate itself and fall 120km away from its initial launchpad, into the waters of the bay of bengal.

The technologies involved and that are expected to be tested are,
> Decceleration, to try reduce speed on re-entry since objects from space drop at blistering speeds into the earth.
> Temperature insulation methods, objects rentering earth, at blistering speeds have blistering temperatures. (remember those sci-fi movies where something drops from space into the ocean and lot of evaporated gases around making up for the sudden cooling of the hot object falling in the water)
> Navigation, guidance and control of the object during the re-entry phase,
> Testing of drop methods, like 3 sequentially openend parachutes at different altitudes once entering the earth,

ISRO says: It would be a forerunner to ISRO mastering the re-entry and recovery technologies, which are required to help ISRO build its long aimbition in launch vehicles, the "re-usable satellite launch vehicle".

The last mission of ISRO trying to launch a few other satellites failed, because the launch vehicle burned up on course, due to faults in the rocket system. Hence this mission is quite important to ISRO and indian space technology buffs to boost up confidence in their work.