Hyderabad: The exploration include getting rocks and soil from the moon on Earth, the proposed Bharatiya Antariksha Station and landing an astronaut on the lunar surface.
“This mission will mark India's entry into the exclusive league of nations capable of mastering space docking,” Union science minister Jitendra Singh said.
“The primary objective of the SpaDeX mission is to develop and demonstrate the technology needed for rendezvous, docking, and undocking of two small spacecraft in a low-Earth circular orbit,” an Isro official said. The secondary objective of the mission includes demonstration of the transfer of electric power between the docked spacecraft, which is essential for future applications such as in-space robotics; composite spacecraft control and payload operations after undocking.
“This capability is vital for India's lunar and interplanetary missions. Docking technology enables multi-launch missions and supports future human spaceflight,” Singh said. After the demonstration of docking and undocking experiments, the satellites will continue to orbit the Earth for standalone missions for two years. SDX01 is equipped with a high resolution camera (HRC) and SDX02 has two payloads — a miniature multispectral (MMX) payload and radiation monitor (RadMon).
These payloads will provide high-resolution images, natural resource monitoring, vegetation studies and on-orbit radiation environment measurements which have numerous applications, Isro said.
The PSLV-C60 mission also carries 24 payloads from various Isro labs, private start-ups and educational institutions for carrying out experiments in space.
These 24 payloads are mounted on the fourth stage of the PSLV rocket which will remain in orbit for a few weeks before falling back on the Earth.
PS4-Orbital Experiment Module (POEM) provides an opportunity for the scientific community to carry out certain in-orbit microgravity experiments for an extended duration of up to three months using the platform, which otherwise would end up as space debris immediately after the mission objective of injecting the primary payloads of the mission.
