Plan To Help Moon-Landing Dream Flight
A small aircraft will be allowed to breach the ‘no-fly zone’ rules over the sprawling and high-profile Science City near Chitradurga soon to help Indian space scientists address challenges when it comes to landing on the moon and Mars.
Reason: this aircraft will carry a special payload — the lander-rover of Chandrayaan-II, to be used for the country’s second shot at landing on the moon — drop it over a scooped out area akin to the lunar surface with scores of large craters, and monitor whether the lander-rover veers itself away from the pits to touch down on a flat tract with the help of an inbuilt autonomous system. With more than 1.8 lakh craters, each measuring more than one km, dotting the surface of the earth’s nearest astral neighbour, scientists at ISRO will carry out this critical test to ensure that when Chandrayaan-II is launched next year, it would land on an even surface.
This is because a descent onto a level surface with the help of inputs from the Orbiter High Resolution Camera (OHRC) will enable the rover to wander around, carry out onsite analysis of the moon’s soil and beam home scientific data through the orbiter. “This is the first time we are going to attempt to land on the moon, so we want to be meticulous with our computation and technology,” top space scientists told The Asian Age, adding that unlike Chandrayaan-I’s Moon Impact Probe (MIP), which crashed into the moon, the lander will be designed to make a soft landing and then deploy the rover. The 20-kg rover will operate on solar power and move on wheels on the lunar soil.
Around the same time as ISRO’s test-landing at Science City, DRDO has planned the maiden test flight of Rustom-II, an advanced Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) at the Aeronautical Test Range in another part of the 8,000-acre campus. This medium-altitude, long-endurance UAV has a range of 250 km, and the capability to carry weapons as well as fly non-stop for five-six hours. The synthetic aperture radar onboard Rustom-II will help the UAV see through dense clouds.
