ISRO says Gaganyaan, Chandrayaan-3 in Mission mode |
Four pilots from the Indian Air Force will leave for Russia in January to receive training as astronauts of Gaganyaan, the first Indian crewed flight to space. They were shortlisted after a series of fitness and endurance tests. The announcement was made in a press conference on Wednesday by ISRO Chairman K. Sivan. The initial tests were conducted in the IAF`s Institute of Aerospace Medicine, Bengaluru, and Russia. The four will be trained at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Centre in Moscow, as per an agreement signed between the space agencies of the two countries last year. Gaganyaan mission, announced by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in August 2018, is the Rs 10,000-crore Indian human space flight scheduled for 2022. It is designed to have 3-7 crew members spend 3-7 days in space in a 400-km orbit. Dr. Sivan said that Gaganyaan activities were on track. The first of the two pre-Gaganyaan flights with a humanoid will be launched this year-end along with some of the six shortlisted microgravity experiments. ISRO has also quietly begun work on another soft landing mission to the moon with most of the same features of Chandrayaan-2. The launch of the nearly Rs 600-crore Chandrayaan-3 is targeted for the end of 2020 or early 2021. ISRO will also be setting up its second launch port in Thoothukudi district of Tamil Nadu for which the government has started acquiring land.
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