ISRO To Launch Its Largest LVM3 Rocket/OneWeb India-2 Mission Today

The 'LVM3-M3/OneWeb India-2 Mission' will be the LVM3 rocket's sixth mission overall and its second mission to Low Earth orbit (between 400-2000 km above earth).

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will conduct the second commercial launch of India's largest rocket, LVM3, from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota on Sunday. 

This will be the LVM3 rocket's sixth mission overall and its second mission to Low Earth orbit, dubbed the 'LVM3-M3/OneWeb India-2 Mission' (between 400-2000 km above earth).

Notably, this is also the shortest time span in which ISRO will carry out two LVM3 rocket missions — on October 23, 2022, and March 26, 2022. This rapid execution is necessary to meet the timelines of the customer OneWeb, whose satellites are being launched.

The OneWeb Satellites: 

The OneWeb constellation is a network of satellites orbiting the Earth with the goal of providing global broadband connectivity. The UK firm is putting together a constellation of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. Bharti Enterprises of India is a major investor and shareholder in OneWeb.

On Sunday, the 18th launch will complete the deployment of its first constellation, allowing it to provide global services. In a mission detail, ISRO stated, "OneWeb will soon be ready to roll out its global coverage." The 150-kilogram satellites are distributed in 12 planes, each separated by four kilometres in altitude to avoid inter-plane collisions.

This will be India's second satellite launch in the last year, after the company severed ties with the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, to launch its satellite constellation due to the Ukraine conflict.

LVM-III: 

LVM-III is a three-stage launch vehicle with two solid propellant S200 strap-ons and core stages that include the L110 liquid stage, C25 cryogenic stage, equipment bay (EB), and Encapsulated assembly (EA). According to ISRO, the Encapsulated assembly consists of the spacecraft, the payload adaptor (PLA), and the payload fairing.

The lift-off mass of the rocket is 640 tonnes. The LVM-III is the renamed title of Geosynchronous Launch Vehicle Mark-III, India's heaviest launch vehicle (GSLV-MkIII). The only reason for changing the vehicle's name from GSLV to LVM is that the rocket will not deploy satellites into geosynchronous orbit. The OneWeb satellites operate at an altitude of 1,200 kilometres in Low Earth Orbit (LEO).