India launches 29 hefty satellites into orbit days after conducting anti-missile tests

Just days after India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) performed an anti-missile test, its space agency launched a military satellite as part of a hefty 29-satellite launch.

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) launched the Electro-Magnetic Intelligence Satellite (EMISAT) at 9:27 a.m. local time in India (12:27 a.m. EDT or 0427 GMT) on Monday.

EMISAT was the primary payload on the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), which also launched 28 international customer satellites from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota.

EMISAT is optimized to look for signals from “enemy radar,” sources from DRDO told The Times of India, and it has been under development for about five years.

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“What this allows us to do now is essentially know what kind of radar is at work on the other side, based on the spectrum, and we will be able to read the distance between the radar and our asset, too,” a scientist involved in the project told the Indian newspaper.

India deliberately destroyed one of its own satellites on March 27 in a low-Earth-orbit test. While international observers worried about possible satellite debris, in news reports, India has said that the test concluded with minimal shards, which will fall back to Earth quickly.

Coincidentally, the U.S. military did a missile defense test of its own last week, with two interceptors successfully blasting an intercontinental ballistic missile out of the sky, but this was done within Earth’s atmosphere.

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