ISRO To Pen New Year ‘POEM’ In Space, Creating “Wealth From Waste”

New Delhi: 

When India launches its specialised observatory to study neutron stars and black holes on New Year’s Day on Monday, it will also send a ‘POEM’ up into space.

The ‘PSLV Orbital Experimental Module’, or POEM, will be the fourth stage of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, which will undertake its 60th flight and carry the XPoSAT, or the X-ray Polarimeter Satellite as its primary payload. The POEM will have 10 experiments, the highlight of which will be a ‘Women Engineered Satellite’ (WESAT) made by an institute in Thiruvananthapuram.

This is the third flight of POEM, which can easily be described as a low-cost, non-human Indian space station. “The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is creating wealth from waste in space,” asserted S Somanath, chairman of the space agency. 

He said that, during earlier missions, the fourth stage of the PSLV was left to burn up in space and create space debris, but it is now being used as a resource, and high-value experiments are being undertaken.  

Some of the experiments on POEM are by Indian startups and others by ISRO to test and validate space technologies, using the spent fourth stage to carry out in-orbit scientific experiments for an extended duration of one to six months.