Megha-Tropiques

Megha Tropiques is an Earth observation satellite, the Indian ISRO and the French CNES.

He was taken on October 12, 2011 at 05:31 UTC with a PSLV - C18 from Satish Dhawan Space launcher Centre in low-Earth orbit. On board the three nano-satellites VesselSat -1, Jugnu ( 3 kg, IIT Kanpur ) and SRMSat were ( 10.9 kg, SRM University of Chennai). VesselSat -1 28.7 kg heavy, was built in Luxspace in Luxembourg and to the identification and tracking of ships to serve on the high seas by the International Automatic Identification System.

The three -axis stabilized satellite with an imaging nine -channel microwave radiometer MADRAS (Microwave Analysis and Detection of Rain and Atmosphere Systems, CNES and ISRO ), the multi-spectral radiometer SCARAB ( Scanner for Radiation Budget, CNES ), the Radio Occultation Sounder for the Atmosphere ( ROSA, Italy ) and the six-channel microwave instrument SAPHIR ( Sondeur atmosphérique du Profil d' Humidité Inter Tropicale par radiometry, CNES ) equipped and is the observation of the weather in the tropics regions and in particular the radiation budget of the reflection behavior of the cloud cover and the energy distribution in the tropical convection are. It is also the name of the satellite derived: Megha (Sanskrit ) means clouds, Tropiques (French) stands for the tropics. It was built on the basis of the Indian IRS satellite bus and has a design life of three years.