ISRO announces Seven Mega Missions

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), recently announced its planned seven mega missions, including Chandrayaan-2 (India’s second lunar exploration mission) which will be conducted over a period of next 10 years. The ISRO has also prepared a roadmap for next 30 years.

Key Highlights

Out of seven missions Chandrayaan-2, will be flight ready by May 2019 and its spacecraft will be launched in July 2019. The rest six are classified as:

1. Defined Missions – which include XPoSat (to study cosmic radiation in 2020) and Aditya-L1(to the Sun in 2021).
2. Undefined Missions – which include missions which are still in planning stage namely Mangalyaan-2 (or Mars Orbiter Mission-2 in 2022), Lunar Polar Exploration (or Chandrayaan-3 in 2024), Venus mission (in 2023), Exoworlds (exploration outside the solar system in 2028).

About Aditya-L1

• Or the ‘Sun Mission’ is scheduled for year 2021.
• Significance: The payloads onboard Aditya-L1 will study solar corona. The Sun’s Corona has an influence on upper atmosphere which impacts climate change on earth. Thus it will play a key role in understanding and predicting climate change on Earth.
• Orbit: It will be placed in a halo orbit around Sun-Earth Lagrangian point (L1), called ‘libration orbit’. It is about 1% of distance between Sun and Earth (about 1.5 million km from Earth) and where gravity of two celestial objects equalises. Placing it in such an orbit will allow spacecraft to circle along with earth and will result in constantly facing the Sun.

About Xposat

• The X-ray Polarimeter Satellite (or Xposat), is ISRO’s dedicated mission to study polarization. It will be launched launch in year 2020.
• It will be a five-year mission and will study cosmic radiation.
• Payload: It will be carrying a payload named ‘polarimeter instrument in X-rays’ (POLIX) made by Raman Research Institute. POLIX will study degree and angle of polarisation of bright X-ray sources in energy range 5-30 keV.
• Orbit: The spacecraft will be placed in a circular 500-700km orbit.

Month: Current Affairs - May, 2019