Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) in its twentieth flight PSLV C-18 proved its reliability and consistency by successfully launching four satellites with a total pay load of 1047 kgs from Satish Dhawan Space Centre(SDSC) - SHAR, Sriharikota on 12th october 2011. The four satellites are Megha-Tropiques, an Indo-French mission to study the weather and climate in the tropical regions of the world; SRMSat, built by students of SRM University, near Chennai; Jugnu, put together by Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur students; and VesselSat from Luxembourg...  

It is yet another successful launch for the ISRO's workhorse PSLV. India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C17) successfully launched GSAT-12 communication satellite today (July 15, 2011) from Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) SHAR, Sriharikota. The launch of PSLV-C17 was the eighteenth successive successful flight of PSLV out of total nineteen flights.

After a smooth countdown of 53 hours, the vehicle lifted-off from the Second Launch Pad at the opening of the launch window at 16:48 hrs (IST). After about 20 minutes of flight time, GSAT-12 was successfully injected into sub-Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (sub-GTO) with a perigee of 284 km and an apogee of 21,020 km with an orbital inclination of 17.9 deg.

It was a perfect launch. At exactly 02.08 a.m. Indian time on Saturday, from Kourou, French Guiana the 800-tonne Ariane 5 launcher carrying two communications satellites weighing over 9000 kilos in its nose fairing, blasted off into space. India’s GSAT-8, the largest and heaviest satellite built by ISRO and its partners weighing 3,100 kg , was one of the two "co-passengers" on the flight. The other, an even heavier satellite weighing 5 tonnes was from Singapore and Taiwan.

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...  

The eighteenth mission of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C16) turned out to be a success on Wednesday, with the rocket placing the 1206 kg Indian Remote Sensing satellite RESOURCESAT-2 as well as 92 kg Indo-Russian YOUTHSAT and the 106 kg X-SAT of Singapore, which are auxiliary payloads – into an 822 km polar Sun Synchronous Orbit (SSO). This was also the seventeenth consecutively successful launch of the PSLV, which has become the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) workhorse...  

It happened to be a disaster - when the launch was scheduled today evening - all awaiting eyes have cheered the smooth lifting , but no one expected it to be a disaster... 

 Launch of India's latest communication satellite GSAT-5P onboard homegrown GSLV-F06, powered by Russian cryogenic engine, failed today when the rocket developed a snag soon after lift-off from the spaceport here...

So it's Christmas time , and celebrations are in every corner . Not less in India , which being a secular country not only Christians but also other people join to celebrate the X-mas . So Candles and prayers may mark the day . But ISRO is planning to celebrate in quiet a different way - by launching it's heaviest satellite to date ,GSAT - 5P  on board GSLV - F06  .