2 persons injured as training aircraft crashes near village in Pune; 2nd incident in 4 days
Pune (PTI): A training aircraft belonging to a private aviation academy crashed near a village in Maharashtra's Pune district on Sunday morning, injuring a trainee pilot and an instructor on board the plane, police said.
The aircraft crashed near Gojubavi village under Baramati taluka at around 8 am, they said.
"A training aircraft, belonging to the Redbird Flight Training Academy, crashed near Gojubavi village. A trainee pilot and an instructor suffered injuries in the crash. Both have been rushed to a nearby hospital," Baramati police station's senior inspector Prabhakar More said.
"The cause of the crash is not yet known. We are conducting a probe into the incident," he said.
This is the second such incident involving the private aviation academy's aircraft in four days.
On Thursday evening, a training aircraft of the academy crashed near Kaftal village in Baramati taluka, injuring a pilot, according to the police.
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ISRO reschedules Proba-3 launch after detecting 'anomaly' in satellite's propulsion system
Sriharikota (Andhra Pradesh), Dec 4: The ISRO has rescheduled the launch of European Space Agency's Proba-3 satellite, meant for solar experiment, for Thursday, after an anomaly was detected minutes before the launch on Wednesday.
The Bengaluru-headquartered space agency had originally planned to launch European Space Agency's (ESA) Proba-3 at 4.08 pm on Wednesday from the spaceport here.
"As per the ESA's request, the launch of PSLV-C59/PROBA-3 has been rescheduled as follows: Date: 05th December 2024 Time: 16:04" (4.04 pm), the space agency said in its latest update. The revised launch was earlier fixed at 4.12 pm on Thursday.
ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said the anomaly occurred in the redundant propulsion system of the Coronagraph spacecraft which was onboard the PSLVC59 mission and currently the scientists were involved in identifying the cause of the incident.
"During Proba3's pre-launch preparations at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in India, an anomaly in the redundant propulsion system of the Coronagraph Spacecraft occurred. This propulsion system is part of the attitude and orbit control subsystem of the satellite and used to maintain orientation and pointing in space." Aschbacher said in a social media post.
"The anomaly is currently under detailed investigation. The use of a software solution by the mission control team at @ESA’s ESEC centre at Redu, Belgium is being evaluated to allow a launch on Thursday 5 December at 11:34 CET (10:34 GMT, 16:04 local time)." he said .
Dubbed as world's first initiative of its kind, the Proba-3 (Project for Onboard Anatomy) consists of two satellites -- Coronagraph (310kgs) and Occulter (240kgs) -- in which two spacecraft would fly together as one, maintaining precise formation down to a single millimetre to study the Corona, the Sun's outer atmosphere.
The European Space Agency (ESA) said the Corona is much hotter than the Sun itself and it is where space weather originates. It is also a topic of widespread scientific and practical interest.
For ISRO, this launch would provide key insights on taking up scientific experiments on the Sun after its maiden mission--Aditya-L1 which was successfully launched in September 2023.
Proba-3 is a technology demonstration mission funded via the General Support Technology Programme. The instruments onboard the satellites would travel closer to the solar rim for up to six hours at a time and each spacecraft would take up approximately a 19-hour orbit around the Earth.
NewSpace India Ltd, the commercial arm of ISRO has bagged the order from the ESA.
The 25-hour countdown was progressing smoothly since it commenced on Tuesday at 3.08 pm and scientists at the spaceport here have been working on preliminary works for the launch.
'Probas' is a Latin word, meaning 'Let's try'.
The mission objective is to demonstrate precise formation flying and the two spacecraft inside the satellites would be launched together in a stacked configuration after the desired orbit level is reached.
PSLV-C59 is a 44.5 metre tall rocket and is on its 61st flight and the 26th with the PSLV-XL variant which is normally used to place heavy satellites.
The two satellites (Coronagraph and Occulter) would undertake an 18-minute journey to reach the desired orbit.
After reaching the preparatory conditions, the two spacecraft would fly 150 metres apart (as one large satellite structure) in tandem so that the 'Occulter' spacecraft would block out the solar disk of the sun enabling 'Coronagraph' to study the corona of the Sun or the surrounding atmosphere, for scientific observation.
