BEL hands over spacecraft components to ISRO

BANGALORE: Premier defence PSU Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL) handed over to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) two Flight Model Travelling Wave Tubes (TWTs), Space-Qualified Components that are used on board Communication Satellites.

At present, there are only a handful of companies in the world, which make Space-Qualified Components for spacecrafts.

Speaking on the occasion, ISRO Chairman Madhavan Nair complimented the indigenisation effort, saying it opened a new leaf in the area of space-qualified components. He also stressed on the need to develop highly efficient solar cells for satellite applications.

BEL Chairman and Managing Director V V R Sastry said that Bharat Electronics Ltd, which supplied state-of-the-art defence equipment to the armed forces, was keen to explore the space segment. "We have had successes on land, underwater and air. And now we are all set to venture into the realm of space," Sastry said.

The TWTs were designed and developed as part of a joint project of BEL, Bangalore, ISRO Satellite Centre, Bangalore, and Central Electronic Engineering Research Institute (CEERI), Pilani.

Based on a design provided by CEERI, Pilani, BEL developed the two Flight Model TWTs called BTC 60 FM1 and BTC 60 FM2 after a series of acceptance tests at its Bangalore unit.

BEL also handed over to ISRO an indigenously developed and tested Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) called BE03RD Relay Driver on the occasion. Ideal for industrial purposes, the relay driver replaces a bulky HMC version and has high breakdown voltage, internal suppression diodes and can resist inductive loads operating with a peak current of 500 milli amperes.

The BE03RD Relay Driver comes in a six-in-one package and all six channels can be used simultaneously. The circuit design, simulation, physical verification and wafer fabrication for this product has been done by BEL using high-voltage, bi-polar technology at its Bangalore unit.

The Relay Driver ASICs were used in SRE, HAMSAT and CartoSAT-2 spacecrafts successfully.

The successful completion of these Space Qualified Components heralds a new era in the synergistic indigenisation and development efforts of scientific organisations in India.

K N Shankara, Director, ISAC, and S N Joshi, Director, CEERI, also spoke on the occasion.