Beyond Sun & Moon: Isro chief Somanath reiterates missions in pipeline | India News

BENGALURU: Isro chairman S Somanath on Tuesday reiterated the department of space’s (DoS) achievements and contribution to the nation in creating an ecosystem to build satellites, rockets and launch it from India and said this was ‘no mean achievement’.

“Between the previous Independence Day (2022) and now, we’ve been very very successful in achieving many missions. The number for this year is a record. We are not just breaking records, but also have unique missions,” he said delivering the Independence Day speech at the Isro headquarters here.
Pointing out that Chandrayaan-3 is being hailed as an important mission and everybody was looking forward to its soft-landing, he said: “We made a new rocket (SSLV) successful, we made the LVM-3 capture the world market in terms of commercial exploitation. We launched satellites like Oceansat-3, which is an engineering marvel. We’ll do many more things in the coming days. Aditya-L1 is ready for launch in the next few weeks.”

He said another interesting science mission, Xposat — India’s first dedicated polarimetry mission to study various dynamics of bright astronomical X-ray — was ready.
“… Xposat is ready now. We will launch another climate observation satellite, the INSAT-3DS, which is getting ready. We’ll do the Gaganyaan test vehicle mission this year and are getting ready for the uncrewed mission early next year, and launch NISAR, a joint mission with Nasa. This year also saw the implementation of space reforms. NSIL and IN-SPACe have scaled great heights and enabled the non-government entities to show their strengths,” he added.