The Space Astronomy Team along with Space Science Instrumentation Facility (SSIF) at U R Rao Satellite Centre (URSC) is involved in scientific research and instrumentation, in the areas of astronomy and astrophysics, solar physics, planetary science, and space weather.

In addition to this, SSIF is setup to assist external colleges, universities and institutions in the design, development and realization of space-worthy science payloads. This shall be carried out in active collaboration with the proposing scientist(s). The primary responsibility of space astronomy team for SSIF is to analyse the scientific and technological requirements of identified proposals, converting the scientific requirement into instrumentation, help them developing the laboratory model of the payload, and oversee the realisation of associated Qualification and Flight payloads at SSIF. Through these activities, space astronomy team provides domain expertise support for developing new scientific payload from laboratory model to the qualification and flight model. This involves simulation and modelling guidance, student training and establishing commonly required major test systems and science calibration facilities. To facilitate the external institutions, space astronomy team has the resources like simulation expertise, basic infrastructure (1000 class clean room, and updated astronomy and electronics laboratory) and system design expert.

Space astronomy team has so far developed and flown various scientific payload experiments like Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) Experiment, Indian X-ray Astronomy Experiment (IXAE), Solar X-ray Spectrometer (SOXS), High Energy X-ray Spectrometer (HEX), Chandrayaan-1 Soft X-ray Spectrometer, Scanning Sky Monitor (SSM) and Geostationary RAdiation SPectrometer( GRASP) in various missions.

The team is currently involved in the realization of the following scientific payloads:
a) Chandrayaan-2 Large Area X-ray Spectrometer (CLASS) on board Chandrayaan-2 orbiter and
b) Solar Low Energy X-ray Spectrometer (SoLEXS) & High Energy L1 orbiting X-ray Spectrometer (HEL1OS) on-board Aditya-L1 Mission

Under the SSIF program, the following activities are being carried out:
a) Design and development of the polarimetry package for the Visible Emission Line Coronagraph (VELC) on board Aditya L1 and
b) Design development of detector package of Solar Ultra-violet Imaging Telescope (SUIT) onboard Aditya L1. The integration and calibration activities are also carried out at space astronomy team under the same program.
c) An university satellite for the IIT Madras named Space based Proton Electron Energy Detector (SPEED) is also in progress.