The KIET Group of Institutions, Delhi-NCR, has won the award in the Crash and Burn category of the annual Human Exploration Rover Challenge, while Kanakia International School from Mumbai was given the Rookie of the Year award. More than 600 students with 72 teams from around the world participated.
India’s Gaganyaan mission is planned for 2025. This mission aims to send three astronauts to an orbit of 400 km in space and bring them back after three days. This will be India’s first human space flight ever. The four crew members for this mission have been shortlisted after a tough selection process.
The shortlisted crew members, who have been chosen from the Indian Air Force, are Group Captain Prashanth Balakrishnan Nair, Group Captain Ajit Krishnan, Group Captain Angad Pratap, and Wing Commander Shubhanshu Shukla. They have undergone intense training for 13 months in Russia and are now preparing for the mission in India.
This human space mission is the first of its kind for India and will cost around Rs.90.23 billion. The Indian Space Research Organisation is carrying out a number of tests to prepare for the mission. If it succeeds in its mis- sion, India will become the fourth country to send a human into space after the Soviet Union, the US, and China.
ISRO
Word Check : Gaganyaan is a Hindi word which means a ‘sky craft’.
India’s first mission to the Sun, Aditya-L1 reached its final destination in space on January 6, 2024. The spacecraft has positioned itself at Lagrange Point 1 in the Sun’s orbit. Aditya, named after the Hindu Sun God, has travelled around 1.5 million km from Earth. It is now at a point where the gravitational forces of both celestial bodies cancel out, allowing it to remain in a stable halo orbit around the Sun.
The Indian Space Research Organisation’s Aditya-L1 mission was launched on September 2, 2023 and took four months to reach the Sun’s orbit. The Indian scientists believe that now since Aditya-L1 is in the Sun’s orbit, it will be able to watch the Sun constantly and carry out scientific studies. Aditya L-1 will spend five years in space observing solar activity, solar wind, and solar flares – and their effect on Earth.
thehindu.com
The Indian space agency has also said that some of the instruments on board the satellite have already started work, gathering data, and taking images.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi called the mission “a landmark” and an “extraordinary feat”.
A preliminary study of the material brought back from the 4.5-billion-year-old Asteroid Bennu shows that the black asteroid dust is made up of carbon and clay minerals rich in water. This provides evidence that asteroids were responsible for helping start life on Earth.
Some scientists believe that asteroids like Bennu could have been responsible for bringing important materials to Earth – like water to help kick-start life around 4.5-bil-2 lion-years ago. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft had left the Earth in 2016. It reached Asteroid Bennu and collected samples in 2020. It then took nearly three years for the NASA spacecraft to travel back to the Earth and drop off the sample at a military base in the US.
The ISRO released pictures of the Gaganyaan spacecraft, which will take humans to space in 2025. The Gaganyaan project plans to take a crew of 2-3 members to a circular orbit of 400 km around the Earth for a one to three days mission and bring them back safely to the Earth.
The space agency also successfully launched its unmanned test flight for its first human spaceflight mission – ‘Gaganyaan’ – in the second attempt on October 21. The test was conducted to check whether the crew could safely escape the rocket in case it malfunctioned. Since the first test was successful, ISRO will send a humanoid – a robot that resembles a human – in an unmanned Gaganyaan spacecraft in 2024.
Did You Know?
If this mission succeeds, India will become only the fourth country to send a human into space after the Soviet Union, the US, and China.
Rakesh Sharma was the first Indian astronaut who went to space in 1984, where he spent 21 days and 40 minutes on a Russian spacecraft.
