Building and testing a satellite is an Herculean task. Making reliable software is exceptionally time-consuming and requires a lot of hard work. Building a working ground station and making sure that it can track a satellite moving at\u00a0 8km\/s above our head is tough. Making sure that the science instrument can reach the level of precision required for detecting the transit of Beta Pic b, and creating a database reliable and efficient enough to store all the data is a challenge all by itself. And today, we are recalled that launching a satellite into orbit — the only thing we were taking for granted so far — is also terribly complex and difficult…<\/p>\n
The Indian rocket PSLV-C39, which lifted-off on schedule from Sriharikota, suffered from some sort of malfunction (apparently, the fairing did not separate), leading to the failure of the mission. More can be read on Space News<\/a> or the Times of India<\/a>.<\/p>\n PicSat is supposed to be launched on the next PSLV (codenamed PSLV-C40). At that time, we have no real info on what will happen to C40. But it would not really be a surprise if it suffers some delay due to the failure of C39…<\/p>\n Yeah, space IS hard.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Building and testing a satellite is an Herculean task. Making reliable software is exceptionally time-consuming and requires a lot of<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"\/picsat\/files\/2017\/09\/pslv_perfo-300x165.png\")