Thumba

Thumba
Thumba Location in Kerala, India
Coordinates:8°31′0″N76°52′0″E
Country	India
State	Kerala
District	Thiruvananthapuram
Government
• Body	Trivandrum Corporation
Languages
• Official	Malayalam,English
Time zone	UTC+5:30(IST)
Vehicle registration	KL-22

Thumbais a coastal area ofThiruvananthapuramcity, the capital ofKerala,India.

Location and geography

FloweringThumba

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 theParvathi Puthannaarcanal, 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 calledThumbagrew in abundance, hence the name. It is well connected by road and the closest railway stations are the Halt stop ofVeli Railway stationand the Major Junction ofKochuveli Railway station.

Overview

See also:Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station

First rocket launched fromThumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Stationin 1963

Thumba became well-known to the outsiders after the establishment ofThumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station(TERLS), which was the first of that kind in India. TERLS was founded in Thumba in 1962 in the district ofTrivandrumon the southern tip of India very close to Earth's magneticequatorto 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 andA. P. J. Abdul Kalam,laterPresident of Indiawere amongst the initial team of rocket engineers.The newVikram Sarabhai Space Centeris located close to TERLS and has become one of ISRO's premiere research and development sites.

Rocket launches

First rocket launch:

The firstsounding rocket,Nike-Apache,was launched rocket on 21 Nov 1963.The project director for this Sodium vapor cloud experiment was Prof. P. D. Bhavsar. TheRohini 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 plasticcomposite 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.ISROannounced their plans to launch 180 number of RH-200 rockets from TERLS over the next five years.

External links

• Thumba
• Thumba from india9.com
• Thumba from zonekerala.com
• Thumba from SpaceRef Asia