Multiple Missions in The Pipeline: This year, ISRO plans to launch a minimum of two more missions. The organisation is focused on a number of major missions, including the in-orbit servicer, lunar sample return mission, docking in space (SPADEX), Mars Lander Mission, etc. While the PM has set a 2040 deadline for landing humans on the moon, lunar sample return missions will be essential to fulfilling India’s aspirations of building a space station by 2035.
Although there is still more work to be done, Chandrayaan3 Vikram’s “lunar hop” is considered a forerunner to the sample return mission. “Aside from these, there’ll be specific committees looking at various missions as part of the goals set by PM,” ISRO chief S Somanath told me, according to TOI.
Launches PSLV and GSLV He continued by saying that the space agency plans to launch at least two additional vehicles in November and December, the GSLV MK-II being the first and the PSLV, which is its mainstay. “Xposat will be launched by the PSLV along with POEM, which will carry commercial and research payloads. We’ll shortly make these features public. The nearly completed Insat3DS will be launched by the GSLV. Today, on Friday, the vibration tests started, according to Somanath.
Multiple Missions in The Pipeline
A weather satellite called Insat-3DS was constructed as a component of the Indian National Satellite System to provide meteorological services, while Xposat is the country’s first dedicated polarimetry mission, designed to investigate the dynamics of intense astronomical X-ray sources under harsh circumstances. But the GSLV MK-II launch is particularly significant for ISRO since it prepares the rocket for the $1.5 billion NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR), a LEO observatory that ISRO and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are developing together.
“Complete integrated testing is being conducted on NISAR. There will be testing to be done on full-scale models, antennas, acoustics, etc. By the first quarter of next year, we will be prepared for launch, Somanath declared. When NISAR is launched in January or March of 2024 and placed into its intended orbit, its science operations will start 90 days later. An observatory is made up of the spacecraft bus and the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) payloads installed atop integrated radar instrument structures (IRIS).
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In just 12 days, the observatory will monitor the entire planet and produce consistent data in both space and time, enabling researchers to better comprehend changes in Earth’s ecosystems, ice mass, biomass of flora, sea level rise, groundwater, and natural dangers. As per ISRO, the project will utilise an improved approach to give space-borne SAR data with high repeat cycle, high resolution, and broader swath. It is the first dual frequency radar imaging mission in both L-Band and S-Band.
