India’s Space Sprint
India Prepares for Two Historic Space Missions
India is ready to bid one giant leap in space exploration with two ambitious missions lined up back-to-back. Shubhanshu Shukla, Group Captain of the Indian Air Force will be the second Indian to go to space almost forty years after the first, Rakesh Sharma by May 2025. His journey aboard the NASA-collaborated Axiom-4 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) is sandwiched right between these two missions-ISRO will launch the long-awaited NISAR Earth observation satellite in June, a joint Indo-US project touted as the world’s most expensive Earth imaging satellite so far.
India Returns to Space: Shubhanshu Shukla Set for Historic ISS Mission
Group Captain Shukla’s voyage to the ISS will have strategic importance apart from being a historic occasion. Having been trained extensively in Russia and America, Shukla is now expected to be the source of information on the life and operations in space to significantly ease preparations for Gaganyaan, India’s first-ever human spaceflight mission. “Today’s announcement of this mission is a major manner of sending a bold signal into India’s opening up of the new era of space exploration,” said Dr. Jitendra Singh, Union Minister for Science and Technology.
The Axiom-4 mission will entrench microgravity adaptation in Shukla’s skills set, some space emergency preparedness, and much more hands-on operational use experience that can be accrued out on the ISS, which is essential to longer-term objectives of sending a human to space from India.
NISAR Satellite: $1.5 Billion Game Changer
Within a few weeks of the time Shukla left, the NISAR-the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperature Radar satellite-is going to be launched from Indian soil. This satellite, intended for Earth observation, has accrued the following major objectives-track and monitor variations in Earth’s environment due to melting ice sheets and rising seawater levels, changes in the ground water level, and other natural calamities like earthquakes and landslides.
The uniqueness of this satellite resides in the design of the technology put inside it. Two different sets of dual-frequency radar will be deployed: L-band from NASA and S-band from ISRO which permits monitoring surface changes where there are smaller than a centimeter.
Under the terms considered in a 2014 agreement, NASA
contributes its L-band SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar), the GPS receivers, a high-data rate telecommunications subsystem, and a payload data recorder. As a comeback, ISRO is providing the satellite bus, C-band radar and the GSLV Mk II for Launch, coupled with some more services.
ISRO in a Busy Launch Schedule: Other Missions Beyond the Horizon
ISRO Chairman V Narayanan during the briefing gave a glimpse of some of the other exciting plans. There is the PSLVV-C61 mission carrying the EOS-09 satellite, which incorporates C-band radar that is capable of providing images of the Earth under all weather conditions at any time of the day or night.
ISRO will launch their Test Vehicle-D2 (TV-D2) mission, the key event of the Gaganyan program. In this particular test, an in-flight failure and subsequent sea recovery of the crew module will be practiced according to real-time safety procedures for all future manned missions.
India’s Cosmic Aspirations Now Come True With spaceflight for Group Captain Shukla and the coming NISAR satellite, India is no more just reaching for the stars—it is touching them. The missions are, after all, about more than technological achievements; they forge a new identity for the country as a global player in space science and exploration, countdown begins while the world watches, India writes its new cosmic tale.
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