Chandrayaan-3 launch in 2021, four from IAF chosen for Gaganyaan: ISRO
Bengaluru, Jan 1: ISRO on Wednesday announced that the launch of country's third lunar mission, Chandrayaan-3 may happen next year and said four from the Indian Air Force have been selected for the ambitious Gaganyaan programme, whose astronaut training would commence soon in Russia.
The announcement comes a day after Union Minister Jitendra Singh said India will launch Chandrayaan-3 in 2020.
Addressing a press conference here, ISRO chairman K Sivan said work related to the third lunar mission was going on smoothly.
It will have a lander, rover and a propulsion module like its predecessor, he noted.
He also said the launch of Chandrayaan-3 may shift to next year.
Work on both Chandrayaan-3 and Gaganyaan, the country's maiden manned space mission, was going on simultaneously, he added.
Noting that Chandrayaan-2 orbiter's mission life was seven years, he said it would be used for the third lunar mission as well.
Giving an estimate of the project cost for Chandrayaan-3, Sivan said, "it would cost Rs 250 crore."
On the launch pad to come up in Tuticorin in Tamil Nadu, Sivan said, "apart from the space port at Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, the land acquisition for a second one has been initiated in Tuticorin district."
As regards the choice of location, he said, "It was mainly to get advantages of southward launch especially for SSLV (Small Satellite Launch Vehicle)."
Observing that the pad, once set up would be used for launching SSLVs initially, he said it may be expanded for big ones in future.
On future missions, he said, "25 missions have been planned for 2020."
"The missions that were planned in 2019 and could not be completed would be finished by March this year," he said.
When asked what went wrong with Vikram lander of Chandrayaan-2, he said it was due to velocity reduction failure.
"The velocity reduction failure was due to internal reasons," he said.
Chandrayaan-2 mission was India's first attempt to land on lunar surface. The ISRO had planned the landing on the South Pole of the lunar surface. However, the lander Vikram hard-landed.
Sivan also congratulated the Chennai based techie who recently located the Vikram lander that hard-landed and maintained that it was the space agency's policy not to release picture of the crashed module.
Elaborating on the country's maiden manned space mission, Gaganyaan, the ISRO chief said, four astronauts have been identified for the mission and their training will start from third week of this month in Russia.
He also mentioned that all the four astronauts chosen for the programme were men from the Indian Air Force.
"We had good progress in 2019 as regards Gaganyaan. And many of the designs were completed and astronauts' selection process is over. Now, four astronauts identified for training purpose.. that process is also completed," Sivan said.
India has signed agreements with Russia and France for cooperation on the Gaganyaan mission.
The ambitious Gaganyaan mission was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his Independence Day speech in 2018.
The space agency has sought an allocation of Rs 14,000 crore from the Centre in the budget for 2020-21.
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6 women dead, 8 persons injured as bus rams into van in Gujarat's Sabarkantha
Sabarkantha (Gujarat) (PTI): Six women were killed and eight other persons injured after a private bus crashed into a van on a highway in Gujarat's Sabarkantha district on Wednesday, police said.
The van was ferrying women from Modasa in Aravalli district when a speeding bus hit it from behind on National Highway 48 connecting Shamlaji to Himmatnagar in the district, Deputy Superintendent of Police A K Patel said.
According to police, the women were part of a catering team for social events. They were travelling from Modasa in the neighbouring Aravalli district to Hunj village in Himmatnagar to attend a function when they met with the accident.
Six women passengers of the van were killed, Patel said.
Seven other women and the van driver suffered injuries, according to police.
The injured persons were rushed to the Himmatnagar civil hospital. The condition of two of them was critical, the hospital's medical officer, Dr Dhrupad Chauhan, said.
The bodies were sent to a government hospital for a postmortem.
VIDEO | Gujarat: Six persons were killed and four others injured after a private bus rammed into a van on a highway in Sabarkantha district on Wednesday, police said.
— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) April 29, 2026
The van carrying passengers was on its way from Shamlaji to Himmatnagar when the speeding bus hit it from… pic.twitter.com/Gvr79LfCvi
