CHENNAI, OCT 9 : Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) Director

Dr. S.Unnikrishnan Nair on Monday said ISRO would be embarking on

the first big mission of Gagayaan from the spaceport of Sriharikota later

this month.

Addressing students from IIT-Madras at its campus and those from

government schools and colleges during an event titled “Over the Moon

with Team Chandrayaan-3′ while honouring 12 of its alumni of IIT-Madras

in ISRO, Dr Unnikrishnan said “this month, we will be having the first big

mission of Gaganyaan from Sriharikota.”

“We are going to demonstrate the in-flight system. In manned missions, it

is not the mission success, but it is the safety of the crew that counts”, he

added.

“We are testing and ensuring that the escape system has got a very high

reliability…te escape system will be activated in transonic conditions, which

is Mach 1.2 and we will demonstrate how the crew will be rescued”, he said.

“We are all looking forward to that mission. There are many exciting missions

in the future”, he said.

Dr. Unnikrishnan said “Another interesting mission that we did at Chitradurga

Range was a winged aircraft that we call a ‘Reusable Launch Vehicle’. Unlike

a conventional satellite, it is a winged body like the space shuttle…the last phase

of this experiment, which is dropping from a high kilometre and landing, that too

in a totally autonomous way using its intelligence, we could do and landed very

close to the central line of the runway.”

“The difference was only 18 cms. That was the type of accuracy we could

achieve. And this technology, maybe in another two years’ timeframe, will

mark another era of reusable launch vehicles, thereby reducing cost”, he said.

Dr. Unnikrishnan said, “In the last one year, India has launched many, many

missions. There were failures and we came out of the failures but there were

some unique missions too. We thought of using inflatable systems. Can we

reduce the speed of an aircraft or a rocket part by inflating a system and

reducing its velocity from supersonic conditions to sub-sonic conditions

so that we can recover the stage and reduce the cost? “

“That was one experiment we did using a sounding rocket and it was a

successful experiment. We are now trying to scale it up, so that in future,

we can recover the spent stages that are falling into the sea and reuse by

using this technology”, he elaborated.(UNI)