Thumba is a coastal area of

Thiruvananthapuram Thiruvananthapuram (; ), also known by its former name Trivandrum (), is the capital of the Indian state of Kerala. It is the most populous city in Kerala with a population of 957,730 as of 2011. The encompassing urban agglomeration populati ...

city, the capital of

Kerala Kerala ( ; ) is a 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 regions of Cochin, Malabar, South ...

, 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 Parvati Puthannar (Malayalam: പാർവതി പുത്തനാർ) is a manufactured canal that runs through the west coast of the Thiruvananthapuram district. It was named after Rani Parvathi Bai, who was the reigning queen of Travancor ...

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. TERLS dedicated to the United Nations on 2 February 1968.

Overview

Thumba became well-known to the outsiders after the establishment of

Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) is an Indian spaceport established on 21 November 1963. Operated by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), it is located in Thumba, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, which is near the souther ...

(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 by its former name Trivandrum (), is the capital of the Indian state of Kerala. It is the most populous city in Kerala with a population of 957,730 as of 2011. The encompassing urban agglomeration populati ...

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

equator The equator is a circle of latitude, about in circumference, that divides Earth into the Northern and Southern hemispheres. It is an imaginary line located at 0 degrees latitude, halfway between the North and South poles. The term can als ...

to launch sounding rockets. Dr. H.G.S. Murthy, D Eswar Das, M R Kurup and

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam (; 15 October 193127 July 2015) was an Indian aerospace scientist and statesman who served as the 11th President of India from 2002 to 2007. He was born and raised in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu and studied phy ...

were amongst the initial team of rocket engineers.

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 used to ...

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 times ...

, 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 Rohini is a series of sounding rockets developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for meteorological and atmospheric study. These sounding rockets are capable of carrying payloads of between altitudes of . The ISRO currently uses ...

(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-fib ...

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 the national space agency of India, headquartered in Bengaluru. It operates under the Department of Space (DOS) which is directly overseen by the Prime Minister of India, while the Chairman ...

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