Crowded July-Aug for Isro with Chandrayaan-3, PSLV & Gaganyaan abort missions; Aditya-L1 aimed for Aug-Sept

BENGALURU: The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), which has a slew of big missions this year, is staring at a busy July with multiple missions crowding the month.
While Chandrayaan-3 is expected to be launched in the second week of the month on the second launch pad at SHAR, the space agency is also looking to launch a commercial PSLV mission, through Space PSU NewSpace India Limited (NSIL) in the same month on the first launch pad, Isro chairman S Somanath confirmed to TOI.
This will be followed by an abort test as part of its preparations for Gaganyaan from the same launch pad. Soon after this, the space agency is aiming to launch Aditya-L1, India’s first solar observatory mission, in the August-September window.
Days after TOI had earlier reported about Isro being confident of Chandrayaan-3 launching in mid-July with the final assembly of payloads having begun in Bengaluru, Isro officials were quoted as having said that the launch was being scheduled for July 12.
Somanath, however, said: “With multiple launches scheduled for July, we are still finalising the dates for each mission. What I can say at this moment is that we will launch Chandrayaan-3 from the second launchpad and the PSLV and Gaganyaan abort missions from the first launchpad. Given the situation, we need to look at availability of various resources, including mission control. A date will be announced at a later stage.”
The abort mission using a special test vehicle Isro has designed, would set the tone for a series of similar exercises before the space agency attempts the first uncrewed mission. Results from each of these missions, performance of all the systems and subsystems would dictate how quickly Isro can progress to the next level and eventually send humans to space and bring them back.
As reported by TOI earlier, the agency has planned different abort scenarios that need to be tested to validate the ability to take astronauts to safety in case of an emergency. In each of these tests, Isro will simulate an anomaly and activate abort commands to check for performance.
“We will also do a second abort mission this year, which will happen a few months after the first one being planned in July,” Somanath said.
So far as Aditya L1 goes, the space agency has made significant progress and is confident of meeting the August-September window, not adhering to which could see the mission slip to the next calendar year.
In this mission, the spacecraft will be placed in a halo orbit around the Lagrange point 1 (L1) of the Sun-Earth system, which is about 1.5 million km from the Earth. The L1 is considered to be a vantage point in space which gives the best chance of efficiently studying the Sun — observing the solar activities and its effect on space weather in real time.
The spacecraft will carry seven payloads to observe the photosphere, chromosphere and the outermost layers of the Sun (the corona) using electromagnetic and particle and magnetic field detectors. “Using the special vantage point L1, four payloads directly view the Sun and the remaining three payloads carry out in-situ studies of particles and fields at L1, thus providing important scientific studies of the propagatory effect of solar dynamics in the interplanetary medium,” Isro said.