‘Chandrayaan-II to be almost fully indigenous’

Nagpur: Indian Space and Research Organization’s (ISRO) Chandrayaan-II mission will be almost fully indigenous project and its launch, though delayed, is expected to be by 2017 end or 2018 beginning. Earlier, the mission was planned in association with Russian Space Agency ROSCOSMOS.
This information was revealed by Suresh Naik, former group director at ISRO, while speaking to TOI on Monday. Naik was in the city for the 10the Late Prof VG Bhide memorial lecture at the Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (VNIT) titled ‘Chandrayaan, Mangalyaan and beyond’.
In contrast to the Chandrayaan-I which crash-landed on the moon, Chandrayaan-II will have soft landing on the moon and it will deploy a rover there. The rover would collect samples from the moon, process it in the inbuilt laboratory and will transfer the data to earth through orbiter. “Chandrayaan-II is a much advanced version. It is being completely designed and developed by ISRO. It is made of three components — an orbiter, a lander and rover configuration. It is expected to be launched by 2017 end using GSLV-Mk II,” Naik said. India will get some minor support from the USA, he added.
“With this mission, India takes a shot at converting fiction into reality. Three decades from now, ISRO plans to set up a human base on the moon and also try to produce pollution-free electricity by mining helium-3 which is abundantly available there,” Naik said, adding to get to the moon under the ‘man mission’ and have a habitation there would require a lot of technological development.
“An Indian astronaut training facility should form an integral part of the missions. By this year end, ISRO is also planning to launch satellites developed by students. As part of this, the premier space research organization has cleared a project by students of College of Engineering, Pune, for developing micro-satellites using photonic propulsion instead of conventional chemical propulsions,” Naik said. He also informed that ISRO is also working towards developing a spacecraft — Aditya — by 2020 which will study the corona of the sun.
“Apart from these activities, other plans of launching various communication, remote sensing satellites and GSATs will continue,” added Naik.