AstroSat Marks a Decade of Groundbreaking Discoveries

India celebrated the tenth anniversary of AstroSat on Sunday, the country’s first dedicated space observatory, which has been orbiting Earth and studying the universe across multiple wavelengths.

Launched on September 28, 2015, aboard PSLV-C30 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, AstroSat has surpassed its initial design life of five years and continues to deliver valuable scientific data across ultraviolet, visible, and X-ray wavelengths. ISRO said, “Celebrating a decade of AstroSat, India’s first multi-wavelength astronomy observatory… AstroSat has provided groundbreaking insights across the electromagnetic spectrum, from UV and visible light to high-energy X-rays. Congratulations to AstroSat on a successful decade, and here’s to many more years of exciting discoveries.”

AstroSat’s very first observations solved a long-standing astronomical puzzle, helping explain the unusual brightness of a red giant star observed in both ultraviolet and infrared light—a mystery that had puzzled scientists for over two decades.

Since then, the observatory has captured photons from galaxies nearly nine billion light-years away, shown that the emission region of the Butterfly Nebula is three times larger than earlier estimates, and advanced research on X-ray polarisation.

AstroSat has also offered fresh insights into galactic mergers, spinning black holes, and binary star systems within the Milky Way. Over the past decade, it has cultivated a global user community, with over 3,400 researchers from 57 countries—ranging from leading scientific institutions in the United States to emerging research centres in countries like Afghanistan and Angola—registered to access its data.

Within India, AstroSat has supported astrophysics research across 132 universities, with nearly half of its active users being Indian scientists and students. All five scientific instruments on board remain fully operational, far exceeding the satellite’s expected lifespan. As India celebrates the mission’s first decade, AstroSat continues to symbolise the nation’s ambition in space science and the importance of long-term international collaboration in astronomy.

The mission is notable for its collaborative foundation. Several ISRO centres—including the U R Rao Satellite Centre, Space Applications Centre, and Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre—worked closely with research institutions such as the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, and the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics. The Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope involved the Canadian Space Agency, while the Soft X-ray Telescope was developed in partnership with the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.

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