ISRO to get 50 million Dollars on EADS order for 2 satellites

Bangalore, Sep 6 (UNI) The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will become richer by 50 million US Dollars after it builds two communication satellites for EADS, under a joint promotion taken up with Astrium.

Disclosing this to newspersons here today, ISRO Satellite Centre Director K N Shankara said that apart from providing the INSAT-1 platform for these two satellites, ISRO would also be involved in testing and tracking them. This would bring in additional income to ISRO.

The satellies were the 3.3 tonne W2M to be built for Eutelsat and the 2.2 tonne Hylas, the first of its kind. Hylas was seen as a potential solution to the problem of unequal access to the internet (the so called digital divide) in Europe.

Hylas was based around a low cost, low risk satellite broadband initiative targeted at the areas of Western Europe that were unlikely to receive terrestrial service within the next ten years.

Integration of W2M satellite would start from this year to ensure that the satellite was launched late 2007. Hylas was scheduled for launch in 2008.

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