The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has added another feather to its cap by launching a polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV) carrying 10 satellites in its payload. The PSLV weighing in at 230 tonnes and almost 12 storeys tall carried a 690 kg CARTOSAT-2A, ISRO's Indian Mini Satellite-1 (IMS-1), weighing 83kg, and eight nano satellites built by universities and research institutes in Canada and Germany. This is for the first time in the world that as many as ten payloads would being launched in a single mission. Previously, Russia had launched eight satellites in one mission.

CARTOSAT-2A, the 13th in the Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) Series, would form a pair with CARTOSAT-2 launched in January 2007, providing more frequent revisit. It carries a solid State Recorder with a capacity of 64 GB to store the images taken by its camera and the images could later be transmitted with the satellite comes within the visibility of a ground station. Indian Mini Satellite-1 (IMS-1) is developed by ISRO. IMS-1 carries two optical payloads - a Multispectral camera (Mx Payload) and a Hyperspectral camera (HySI Payload). Both Mx and HySI payloads operate in the visible and near infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The data from this mission will be made available to developing countries.