Thumba is a coastal area of

Thiruvananthapuram Thiruvananthapuram ( ), also known as Trivandrum, is the Capital city, capital city of the Indian state of Kerala. As of 2011, the Thiruvananthapuram Municipal Corporation had a population of 957,730 over an area of 214.86 sq. km, making it the ...

city, the capital of

Kerala Kerala ( , ) is a States and union territories of India, state on the Malabar Coast of India. It was formed on 1 November 1956, following the passage of the States Reorganisation Act, by combining Malayalam-speaking regions of the erstwhile ...

, India.

Location and geography

Thumba is a vast village bordering Menamkulam in the east, St. Dominic's Vettucaud in the north, and Kochuthura in the south; towards its west is the Arabian Sea. While the border with Menamkulam is the Parvathi Puthannaar canal, the border with Kochuthura is the Rajiv Gandhi Nagar road. The entire village is flat at sea level, and the ground near to the coast is made of tan-coloured beach sand. This is in stark contrast to the rest of the village, where the ground is made of white sand, where, till the developments of the late 1990s, large amounts of a medicinal herb with white flowers called ''Thumba'' grew in abundance, hence the name. It is well connected by road and the closest railway stations are the Halt stop of

Veli Railway station Veli railway station (Code:VELI) is a railway stations serving the Indian city of Trivandrum, the capital of the state of Kerala. It lies on the Kollam–Thiruvananthapuram rail line. Veli lake is situated near the railway station in Trivandr ...

and the Major Junction of Kochuveli Railway station.

Overview

Thumba became well-known to the outsiders after the establishment of Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS), which was the first of that kind in India. TERLS was founded in Thumba in 1962 in the district of

Trivandrum Thiruvananthapuram ( ), also known as Trivandrum, is the capital city of the Indian state of Kerala. As of 2011, the Thiruvananthapuram Municipal Corporation had a population of 957,730 over an area of 214.86 sq. km, making it the largest and ...

on the southern tip of India very close to Earth's magnetic

equator The equator is the circle of latitude that divides Earth into the Northern Hemisphere, Northern and Southern Hemisphere, Southern Hemispheres of Earth, hemispheres. It is an imaginary line located at 0 degrees latitude, about in circumferen ...

to launch sounding rockets.TERLS was dedicated to the United Nations on 2 February 1968. Dr. H.G.S. Murthy, D Eswar Das, M R Kurup and A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, later

President of India The president of India (ISO 15919, ISO: ) is the head of state of the Republic of India. The president is the nominal head of the executive, the first citizen of the country, and the commander-in-chief, supreme commander of the Indian Armed ...

were amongst the initial team of rocket engineers. The new Vikram Sarabhai Space Center is located close to TERLS and has become one of ISRO's premiere research and development sites.

Rocket launches

First rocket launch: The first

sounding rocket A sounding rocket or rocketsonde, sometimes called a research rocket or a suborbital rocket, is an instrument-carrying rocket designed to take measurements and perform scientific experiments during its sub-orbital flight. The rockets are often ...

Nike-Apache The Nike Apache, also known as Argo B-13, was a two-stage sounding rocket developed by Aerolab, later Atlantic Research, for use by the United States Air Force and NASA. It became the standard NASA sounding rocket and was launched over 600 time ...

, was launched rocket on 21 Nov 1963. The project director for this Sodium vapor cloud experiment was Prof. P. D. Bhavsar. The Rohini Sounding Rocket (RSR) program to develop indigenously developed and fabricated sounding rockets launched the first single-stage Rohini (RH-75) rocket (32 kg rocket with 7 kg payload to ~10 km altitude) in 1967, followed by a two-stage Rohini rocket (100 kg payload to over 320 km altitude). Other launches: Apart from Indian payload, sounding rockets from many other countries (including United States, Russia, Japan, France, Germany) were also launched from Thumba, as part of mutual international collaboration. TERLS developed infrastructure for all aspects of rocketry, ranging from rocket design, rocket propellant, rocket motor casting, integration, payload-assembly, testing, evaluation besides building subsystems like payload housing and jettisonable nose cone.

Fibre-reinforced plastic Fibre-reinforced plastic (FRP; also called fibre-reinforced polymer, or in American English ''fiber'') is a composite material made of a polymer matrix reinforced with fibres. The fibres are usually glass (in fibreglass), carbon (in carbon-fibre ...

composite materials for nose cone were used in early programs at TERLS. The rocket launch from TERLS came to a stand-still in 2000. Later in 2002, the rocket launchings were resumed from TERLS.

ISRO The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO ) is India's national space agency, headquartered in Bengaluru, Karnataka. It serves as the principal research and development arm of the Department of Space (DoS), overseen by the Prime Minister o ...

announced their plans to launch 180 number of RH-200 rockets from TERLS over the next five years.

References

External links

Thumba

{{Indian space programme Suburbs of Thiruvananthapuram