After one month of radio silence, the ground station at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, received a signal from Pratham satellite on the morning of December 17, suggesting that it was still alive and kicking. Pratham is the first satellite to be sent into space by an IIT.

The satellite had received signals in the first few weeks after its launch on September 26, this year, but had gone quiet in November, due to technical difficulties, causing team members to worry if it was still operational.

"The fact that we received a signal on Saturday suggests that the satellite has now stabilized and is back to collecting data," said Ratnesh Mishra, project manager of Pratham. While Mishra says that the incoming signal means that the satellite is functional, data transfer is yet to take place.
The signal was also received by Ham communities across the world including in the Netherlands, Chicago, Brazil, and Indonesia.


What is Pratham?

The satellite, the brainchild of two former aerospace engineering students, Saptarsi Bandyopadhyay and Shashank Tamaskar, was conceived in 2008 and since its inception, has had seven batches handle its project team. It was launched on an Indian Space Research Organization's (ISRO) launch vehicle from Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota, on September 26, 2016.
Eight members of the project team's 30 handle the ground station, which was built inside the Department of Aerospace Engineering building. The team of eight is responsible for monitoring the movement of the satellite roundthe-clock. The satellite passes over the ground station at least twice a day (usually in the morning) and this is when data will get uploaded.All the data will be made available to the scientific community on their official website: http:www.aero.iitb.ac.in/pratham


The scientific objective of the payload of the 10-kg satellite is to measure the TEC (Total Electron Count) of the ionosphere, which in turn, will help give more accurate predictions of GPS (Global Positioning System) data. As electrons interfere with the GPS system, obtaining their count will help improve the accuracy of the system.