New Delhi: At the 76th International Astronautical Congress in Sydney, Australia, ISRO Chairman V Narayanan revealed ISRO’s future plans for lunar exploration. Narayanan said, “Coming to the future, lot of programmes are there. Chandrayaan 4 is a sample return mission. We started with orbiter, went with soft landing, now we are talking about sample return mission. It is going to be a huge mission. Basically, it is a 9,600 kg satellite, and our vehicle capability, we cannot lift in a single vehicle. So, we are going to liftoff using two vehicles, it has to be docked in space, then we have to do undocking and landing. Lot of technology development is required. This year, I am happy to inform the august audience that one of the important experiments, the space docking experiment we have successfully done. This year also, we demonstrated for the first time, a robotic arm.”
The space docking, undocking, redocking and transfer of power and data from one satellite to another was demonstrated at the start of the year. V Narayanan revealed that all the planned operations for the mission were carried out using only 50 per cent of the planned fuel budget. This was the first time that ISRO has demonstrated space docking capabilities, which will be required for mating the elements from two launches for the Chandrayaan 4 sample return mission, that was approved by the Union Cabinet in September last year. A robotic arm for capturing space debris was demonstrated from the POEM-4 platform, also early in the year. Both the docking capabilities and a robotic arm are expected to be used on the planned Bharatiya Antariksh Station.
The Chandrayaan 5/LUPEX mission
Narayanan also revealed plans for the Chandrayaan 5/LUPEX mission, a collaboration with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), “Another mission is the LUPEX mission, our colleagues are there from JAXA. I have to thank them and we both are working together. It is a heavy lander mission, their launch vehicle. Together, we are working. Chandrayaan 3 was a 1,600 kg lander, this will be something around 6,800 kg lander. Chandrayaan 3 we had a 25 kg rover, which was doing the experiments, here we will be using around 350 kg rover. The life of Chandrayaan 5/LUPEX is going to be 100 days, which is going to bring lot of scientific outcome for the global scientific community.” ISRO plans to launch the Chandrayaan 4 mission in 2027 and the Chandrayaan 5/LUPEX mission in 2028.