ISRO says it has lost contact with GSAT-6A

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) confirmed on Sunday afternoon that communication with GSAT-6A, the country's newest communication satellite, was lost after the second firing of the on-board engine, which was performed on Saturday.

“Efforts are under way to establish the link with the satellite," a statement from the space agency said.

News started creeping around forenoon on Saturday that a power glitch showed up while engineers were doing the satellite's second orbit manoeuvre from the Master Control Facility (MCF) in Hassan. It seems that the GSAT-6A was not sending back signals. The top brass, including Chairman K. Sivan, ISRO Satellite Centre (ISAC) and MCF officials went into a huddle at the ISRO headquarters and later at the MCF.

One person familiar with satellite technologies said spacecraft have redundancies or backups; the MCF worked on it overnight on Saturday.

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All you need to know about ISRO’s GSAT 6A satellite launch

The 2,000 kg-plus GSAT-6A was launched on the indigenous GSLV rocket on March 29 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. It was placed in an initial elliptical orbit 169.4 km x 36,692 km.

The MCF picked up its control within minutes. From March 30, it started routinely correcting the orbit into a circular one — a critical but frequently done exercise that lasts for about a week to ten days.

After the first on-board motor firing for about 36 minutes on Friday morning, the ISRO announced that the satellite's orbit became 36,412 km X 5,054 km with an inclination of 11.93 degrees to the Equator; it was circling the Earth almost every 13 hours.

Built to last ten years in space, GSAT-6A came with a technology that combines a large unfurlable S-band antenna in space and small, hand-held ground terminals highly suited for the military in remote area operations. It was expected to join its three-year-old sibling, GSAT-6, in the next few weeks.

On August 31 last year, the ISRO lost navigation satellite IRNSS-1H in a freak manner.

One of its biggest losses in communication fleet was the INSAT-2D, which died in its orbit in October 1997, just four months into work.