2024-07-18 07:42:12
Ernakulam: The world is now acknowledging India’s achievements in the field of space. Former NASA astronaut Steve Lee Smith has also become a fan of India’s space program. Smith said that India has done such feats that no other country has been able to do. Smith was referring to India’s ‘Chandrayaan-3’ mission, which made India the first country to successfully land a spacecraft in the south pole region of the Moon. Talking to ANI, he said, “India has been very successful in space in the last 20 years and is highly respected around the world. Mission Over Mars was the first time a country orbited Mars in its first attempt. India also landed on the Moon last year. In world history, they did something that no one has ever done.” He said about India’s future space efforts, “Just a few months later, India is preparing its own capsule to send humans into space and they have also named their astronauts. It is expected that Indian astronauts will go into space on Indian spacecraft.” Smith had earlier on Thursday lauded India’s “bold” goals and relentless mindset in achieving its lunar mission, Chandrayaan-3, leaving behind space giants like Russia, Japan and the US. He was speaking at a session on “Lessons Learnt from Skywalker” at the country’s first International Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) conference organised by the Kerala State Industrial Development Corporation (KSIDC) in collaboration with IBM.
Indian Astronauts at ISS
NASA is part of a programme to train two Indian astronauts, one of whom will fly to the International Space Station (ISS) later this year. ISRO Chairman S Somnath had earlier mentioned that ISRO will select four astronauts for training. India’s planned space station will be built and operated by ISRO. The Indian space station is expected to be completed by 2035. The station, smaller than the ISS, will weigh 20 tonnes and will be used for hydrogravity experiments, orbiting Earth at an altitude of about 400 km.
Aditya L-1 created history
ISRO’s first solar mission Aditya-L1 mission achieved a milestone, with the spacecraft completing its first halo orbit around the L1 point of the Sun and Earth on July 3. Launched on September 2 last year, the Aditya-L1 mission is an Indian solar observatory at the Lagrangian point L1. The spacecraft was inserted into its targeted halo orbit on January 6 and took 178 days to complete one revolution around the L1 point.