Bengaluru:Â The Chairman S Somanath of the Indian Space Research Organisation said on Sunday that they have lined up a series of exploration missions, including to Mars, Venus, and the Moon again, apart from the maiden human spaceflight program.
We have missions for exploration. We intend to visit Mars, Venus, and the Moon once again in the future. The CEO continued, “We also have programs examining Earth’s climate and weather.
The space organization also has plans to launch missions to study Earth’s climate and weather conditions.
Besides, it works on regular scientific missions, including communication and remote sensing satellites.
About the Gaganyaan program, Somanath, the Secretary of the Department of Space, said the maiden TV-D1 test flight is scheduled for October 21.
His speech highlighted that scientific missions are also planned to study topics like aeronomy, thermal imaging, and the assessment of the effects of climate change.
Answering the questions about the response from the Vikram lander of the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, which successfully landed on the Moon’s surface on August 23, he said it is happily sleeping on the Moon. It had done its job well during the lunar day (the equivalent of 14 Earth days) when it was programmed to perform its functions. It performed different tasks on the lunar surface, including detecting the presence of sulfur and recording relative temperature.
In September, following the onset of night on the Moon, ISRO attempted to re-establish contact with rover Pragyan and lander Vikram after they were put into sleep mode. However, signals have yet to be received.
About ISRO’s maiden mission to study the Sun, Somanath said the spacecraft is ‘very healthy’ and is on a 110-day journey to the Lagrange point L1 and is expected to reach the intended destination by “middle of January.”.
Aditya-L1 was launched on September 2, and it is the first Indian space-based observatory to study the Sun from a halo orbit around the first Sun-Earth Lagrangian point (L1), located roughly 1.5 million km from the Earth.
