"7,200 Tests Completed": ISRO Declares 2025 As Gaganyaan Year
Kolkata:
Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chief V Narayanan highlighted the importance of 2025, which has been declared the "Gaganyaan" year.
The ISRO chief said that 7200 tests have been completed as of now, and 3000 tests are pending.
The Gaganyaan Programme, approved in December 2018, envisages human spaceflight to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and establishing technologies required for a long-term Indian human space exploration endeavour.
V Narayanan was speaking at an event in Kolkata on Thursday.
"This year is a very important year for us. We have declared it Gaganyaan year. Before sending the humans, we have planned three uncrewed missions and the first uncrewed mission is planned this year... Till date, more than 7200 tests have been completed and about 3000 tests are pending, work is going on 24 hours", V Narayanan said.
V Narayanan expressed his happiness over the completion of SpaDeX mission. He asserted that ISRO "accounted for ten kilos of fuel to do this mission."
He further informed that a number of missions are planned in 2025 which includes a NASA-ISRO synthetic aperture radar satellite, which will be launched by India's own launch vehicle.
"Today, we are happy to report that the SpaDeX mission has been successfully completed. We accounted ten kilos of fuel to do this mission, but we did it with only half the fuel and the rest of the fuel is available, and in the coming months, you will hear that a lot of experiments are planned... This year, a number of important missions are planned and there is going to be a NASA-ISRO synthetic aperture radar satellite and it will be launched by our own launch vehicle and we are going to have a commercial mission and a communication satellite for commercial aspects, which we are going to launch", he added.
According to ISRO's official website, the SpaDex mission is a cost-effective technology demonstrator mission that uses two small spacecraft launched by PSLV to demonstrate in-space docking.
The ISRO chief said that by December 2025, the first uncrewed mission to be called as "Vyommitra", followed by two uncrewed missions, will be launched by ISRO. In contrast, the organisation targets the first human space flight by the first quarter of 2027.
"By December this year, there will be the first uncrewed mission, followed by two uncrewed missions, and we are targeting the first human space flight by the first quarter of 2027. In fact, almost every month this year, a launch is scheduled. The first uncrewed mission with a robot called 'Vyommitra' will be launched by the end of this year", V Narayanan told reporters.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
India Today
14 minutes ago
- India Today
Tracking Earth, inch by inch
WHAT: The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) satellite, to be placed in a low earth orbit soon, will scan the Earth's surface every six days measuring minute changes down to a centimetre. With each pixel capturing an area about half the size of a tennis court, it will track how quakes, volcano eruptions and landslides occur; measure the advance or retreat of glaciers and ice sheets; and monitor the growth/loss of forests and wetlands.
India Today
2 hours ago
- India Today
Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla's father has a message for his son
A wave of pride and jubilation has swept through Lucknow as Indian Air Force (IAF) Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla gears up to embark on a historic journey to the International Space Station (ISS) with Axiom Space's fourth private astronaut mission, scheduled for launch on June Captain Shukla, who will become the first astronaut from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to visit the ISS, is set to make history as India's second national astronaut in space since Rakesh Sharma's iconic 1984 Ax-4 mission, a joint effort between NASA, ISRO, and the European Space Agency (ESA), marks a significant milestone in India's growing role in international space exploration. The excitement is palpable in Shukla's hometown. His father, Shambhu Dayal Shukla, expressed immense pride and gratitude, stating, 'We are delighted. Now, his goal has been achieved. He has been preparing for this since 2019. I wish this mission to be successful. It is a matter of pride for the nation.'He also thanked Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath for their Shukla, the astronaut's mother, highlighted the crucial role of family support, especially from Shukla's wife. 'It is a big achievement. We are proud of him. Our daughter-in-law has supported him a lot. He could not have done this without her support,' she to group captain in March 2024, Shukla is an accomplished IAF pilot with over 2,000 flight hours on a range of aircraft. He is also among the astronauts selected for ISRO's upcoming Gaganyaan mission, India's first human spaceflight program. Promoted to group captain in March 2024, Shukla is an accomplished IAF pilot with over 2,000 flight hours. (Photo: Axiom Space) Joining Shukla on the Ax-4 mission are ESA project astronaut Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski of Poland, Tibor Kapu of Hungary, and mission commander Peggy Whitson, a veteran NASA crew will conduct nearly 60 scientific investigations from 31 countries, with ISRO spearheading transformative research in collaboration with NASA and the countdown begins, Lucknow and the nation watch with pride, hopeful for another triumphant chapter in India's space Watch
Mint
4 hours ago
- Mint
What space, submarines and polar research teach about teamwork
If you are fed up with the other people on your team, remember this: it could be so much worse. Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, two American astronauts, returned to Earth on March 18th after a planned days-long mission to the International Space Station turned into a nine-month stay. At the SANAE IV research station in Antarctica, reports have emerged of assault, death threats and intimidation among a team of South African scientists who arrived there in February; they are due to leave the base only in December. Submariners on Britain's nuclear-armed subs can be at sea for six months or more. Spacecraft, polar-research stations and submarines are among a set of environments classed as isolated, confined and extreme (ICE). They put that two-day off-site retreat you're dreading into perspective. They also put very specific stresses on teams. Most obviously, there is no real escape from each other. If you storm out of an Antarctic research station, you will storm back in again fairly quickly. Privacy will always be limited: a British nuclear sub has a crew of 130 or so in a vessel whose length a sprinter would cover in under 20 seconds. Its absence is likely to be particularly obvious to women in male-dominated teams. Family members are a very long way away; any future missions to Mars would involve crews spending years away from home. These are plainly not typical team environments. You cannot tell a story that no one else knows about you, do a few trust falls—and then blast off. NASA, America's space agency, simulates the conditions of space at a facility in Houston called the Human Exploration Research Analogue (HERA), a 650-square-foot structure where crews can spend weeks at a time on mock missions. A paper by Mathias Basner of the University of Pennsylvania and his co-authors reports on a 520-day simulation of a mission to Mars that was conducted in Moscow in 2011. Of a multinational crew comprising six male volunteers, one reported symptoms of depression almost all the way through. Only two crew members reported no sleep disturbances or psychological distress, which makes them the weirdest of the lot. Extreme though these situations are, they provide a magnified lens on more quotidian team problems. One example is tedium. Missions to ICE environments can be a curious combination of danger and monotony. Antarctic explorers report that it is preferable to follow someone on the ice than to lead, because at least there is something to look at. But there are ways to inject meaning into the mundane whatever the workplace. A paper by Madeleine Rauch of the University of Cambridge looks at the disconnect experienced by UN peacekeepers between the abstract ideals of their work and the humdrum reality of it. She finds that people cope better with boredom if they are able to reframe tedious tasks as steps towards the larger goal. Another magnified problem is conflict. Small things can lead to great friction among colleagues in every workplace. ('Wow, you want to see crew dynamics," reads one entry in a journal kept by an astronaut on the International Space Station, about an attempt to take a group photo. 'I thought we were going to lose a member of the crew during that one.") But defusing conflict is much more important if there is nowhere for an angry worker to cool off. Personality obviously matters here. Some of the traits that seem to predict successful team members in ICE environments include agreeableness, emotional stability and humour. Empathy also matters. In his book 'Supercommunicators", Charles Duhigg describes research conducted at NASA to test would-be astronauts for their instinctive capacity to match the emotions, energy levels and mood of an interviewer. Tactics can help mitigate conflict, too. Regular team debriefs are a constructive way to bring simmering issues to the surface, especially if crews have very limited contact with mission control. A paper on long-duration space exploration by Lauren Blackwell Landon of NASA and her co-authors suggests that debriefs can be effective hurtling away from Earth as well as on it. ICE environments plainly place very unusual demands on people. But they can teach some lessons about boredom, team composition, conflict resolution and more. And knowing that they exist might just make you feel happier about the daily commute. Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence.
