The Human Space Mission: Gaganyaan is targeted for December 2021. The Gaganyaan Programme has been approved by the Government of India. The design and configuration of major subsystem are finalized. The procurement and system/ subsystem realisation for tests and flight has commenced.
Glavkosmos JSC, part of Roscosmos State Space Corporation, and Human Space Flight Centre of Indian Space Research Organization (HSFC of ISRO) on Friday signed a contract to review a project to assess the possibility of using Russian flight equipment in life support systems and providing thermal regime for the manned spacecraft Gaganyaan.Dmitry Loskutov, Director General of Glavkosmos, and Dr. Unnikrishnan Nair, Head of the HSFC, signed the contract. The signing ceremony was held in the presence of Deputy Director General for international cooperation of Roscosmos State Space Corporation Sergey Savelyev."We hope that the signing of this document and the implementation of its provisions will serve both the development of the Indian space program and manned space flights, and in general the further strengthening of good Russian-Indian relations," Loskutov said. "We will be glad to expand our cooperation."
India plans to have its own space station in the future and conduct separate missions to study the Sun and Venus, it said on Thursday, as the nation moves to bolster its status as a leader in space technologies and inspire the young minds to take an interest in scientific fields.India’s space agency said today that it will begin working on its space station following its first manned mission to space, called Gaganyaan (which means “space vehicle” in Sanskrit), in 2022 — just in time to commemorate 75 years of the country’s independence from Britain. The government has sanctioned Rs 10,000 crores ($1.5 billion) for the Gaganyaan mission, it was unveiled today.“We have to sustain the Gaganyaan program after the launch of the human space mission. In this context, India is planning to have its own space station,” said Dr. Kailasavadivoo Sivan, chairman of Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). ISRO is India’s equivalent to NASA.
India is setting up a military space agency called the Defence Space agency (DSA) that’s expected to command of all the space assets of India’s army, navy and air force.For nearly the last decade, a debate has taken place in India highlighting the need to establish a Space Command to address military needs. For all these years, India has had a Military Space Cell, a tri-service organization under the aegis of the Integrated Defence Services, or IDS. Formation of this organization was announced on June 10 2008, by the then-defense minister.The idea of DSA was mooted a few years back, possibly with a view to make an incremental increase in the space-related defense infrastructure. Hence, instead of having a Space Command headed by a three-star general, it was thought suitable to create a DSA headed by a two-star general. All these structures had a relevance when India was not a military power with anti-satellite (ASAT) capability. However, now that India successfully conducted its March 27 ASAT, can DSA take India’s military space agenda further, or there is a need to establish a separate ecosystem for this?
At a little over 11.10am Wednesday, a 13 metre-long, 19-ton missile took off from the Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Island launch complex off the coast of Odisha. Three minutes and 10 seconds later, it struck the 6,900mm-wide heart of a Microstat-R satellite — orbiting 268km above the earth — over the Bay of Bengal, blowing it to bits. India launched the satellite almost two months ago to the day, on January 29.A little over an hour later, at 12.20 pm, after a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a rare address to the nation that with the success of Mission Shakti, India had become only the fourth member of an exclusive club of nations — with the US, Russia and China — to have anti-satellite missile capability.Soon after the missile struck the satellite, Modi and national security adviser Ajit Doval were informed by Defence Research Development Organisation (DRDO) chief Satheesh Reddy and Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) chief K Sivan over the phone, using a pre-decided coded message.
India’s navy will open a third air base in the far-off Andaman and Nicobar islands on Thursday to beef up surveillance of Chinese ships and submarines entering the Indian Ocean through the nearby Malacca Straits, military officials and experts said.
Giving a boost to the country's maiden human spaceflight programme, the Union Cabinet on Friday approved a budget of Rs 10,000 crore for India's Gaganyaan project, whose 2022 deadline was fixed by PM Narendra Modi + during his I-Day speech from the ramparts of Red Fort on August 15, 2018."The Union Cabinet has approved the Gaganyaan project under which a three-member crew will be sent to space for at least seven days," Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad announced at a press conference on Friday.
The union cabinet on Thursday approved a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between India and Russia on joint activities under human spaceflight programmeIndia and Russia will strengthen cooperation in space programmes, including manned space missions, under a memorandum of understanding signed between the two countries in October.The MoU will provide an impetus for development of technologies and advanced systems required for the human space flight programmes, such as radiation shielding, life support systems, crew module, rendezvous and docking systems, space suit, training for astronauts etc.The MoU will lead to a joint activity in the field of application of space technologies for the benefit of humanity. It will also help in the setting up of a joint working group, which will further work out the plan of action, including the time-frame and the means of implementing the provisions of the agreement.
When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced earlier this month that the Indian Navy had completed its first sea-based nuclear deterrent patrol it was more of a statement of intent than a demonstration of a new capability.The Indian Navy’s new ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) INS Arihant was the boomer that completed the month-long deterrent patrol. Whilst this is not insignificant – it is the first country outside of the five members of the U.N. Security Council to develop this capability – it also shows how far away India is to achieve its goal of joining the other great powers in establishing a credible sea-based deterrent.Only the U.S., U.K., France and Russia can sustain continuous-at-sea deterrent patrols, which a provides continuous launch capability of a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) by maintaining at least one SSBN on station at any one time that could fire a nuclear missile. A continuous patrol requires a minimum of four SSBNs.The patrol as a statement will have more effect in diplomatic circles than in military ones. India wants to join the club of countries that can support a sea-based deterrent and eventually achieve a continuous at-sea nuclear deterrent. It also means India will have the ability to launch all three air, land and sea-based types of nuclear weapons and a more robust second strike capability.
With the second refitment of INS Vikramaditya over, the country’s lone operational aircraft carrier will be entering the sea-trial stage by next week. The short refit, at an expense of Rs 705 crore, was carried out at the Cochin Shipyard and the aircraft carrier is now docked at Ernakulam Wharf, prior to the commencement of the sea trials.During an onboard visit arranged by the Navy for media persons on Saturday, Commanding Officer of INS Vikramaditya Captain Puruvir Das said the refitment of the ship has been completed.“However, a few tests, including the checks on the ship’s boilers, are underway. Soon, we will start the sea trials, which will take place off the Kochi and Goa coasts. We are hopeful of returning to the Western Naval Command without delay,” he said.
On September 25, 2018, the delegation of the Roskosmos State Corporation headed by Dmitry Rogozin met with representatives of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).The main topics of negotiations between the two space organizations were: joint work within the framework of manned space programs, where the Russian side is ready to offer its significant achievements and partnership, as well as possible joint initiatives in the areas of satellite navigation.Russia is also ready to develop cooperation with India in rocket engineering and engine building, remote sensing of the Earth (RS), space meteorology, astrophysical research and study of planets.
Sea trials of the indigenously built aircraft carrier, Vikrant, are expected to commence by early 2020, a Defence spokesperson said on Thursday. The Indigenous Aircraft Carrier (IAC) Project was reviewed by defence secretary Sanjay Mitra at Cochin Shipyard Limited (CSL) in Kochi, he said.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Thursday successfully conducted a pad abort test (PAT) on its experimental crew escape system (CES).
The successful test on the technology demonstrator brought ISRO a step closer to its ambitious and yet-to-be-named future manned mission – the Human Spaceflight Programme (HSP).ISRO said PAT was the first in a series of tests to qualify the CES, which is an ‘emergency measure to pull the crew module along with the astronauts to a safe distance from the launch vehicle, in the event of a launch anomaly.’
India will take another step forward with its human spaceflight program Thursday, when ISRO tests the crew escape system for its crew capsule in an emergency pad abort situation. The test will last about 220 seconds, beginning during a two-hour window that opens at 06:00 local time (00:30 UTC).While the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has not made manned space missions one of their highest priorities, the agency has been quietly proceeding with work on a capsule that would launch atop the GSLV Mk.III rocket and carry a crew of two into orbit.The project’s most high-profile test came three and a half years ago, when the Crew Module Atmospheric Reentry Experiment (CARE) successfully demonstrated that the spacecraft could withstand the rigors of atmospheric reentry.
A CENTURY and a half ago linguists invented a new map of the world. Their research showed that a single family tree stretches its branches almost unbroken across most of Eurasia: from Iceland to Bangladesh, most people speak languages descended from “Proto-Indo-European”. The philologists had a theory to explain why Sanskrit, the ancient forebear of Hindi, has closer cousins in Europe than in south India. They speculated that at some point before the composition of the Vedas, the oldest texts of Hinduism, an Aryan people had migrated into India from the north-west, while their kin pushed westward into Europe.Long before the Nazis dreamed of an exalted master race, imperialists seized on what some dubbed the “Aryan invasion” theory to paint Britain’s rule of India as the extension of a “natural” order. Indians, too, found a use for it. Caste-bound Hindu conservatives declared that the paler-skinned intruders must be ancestors of higher-caste Brahmins and Kshatriyas. Such talk stirred a backlash in southern India, where generally darker-skinned speakers of Dravidian languages were urged to see themselves as a separate nation.Hindu nationalists took a different tack. The West, some said, had made up the theory to set Hindus against each other. Christian missionaries and communists were using it to stoke caste hatred and so to recruit followers, they claimed. Worse, the theory challenged an emerging vision of Mother India as a sacred Hindu homeland. If the first speakers of Sanskrit and the creators of the Vedas had themselves been intruders, it was harder to portray later Muslim and Christian invaders as violators of a purity that good Hindus should seek to restore. So it was that some proposed an alternative “Out of India” theory. This held that the original Aryans were in fact Indians, who carried their Indo-European language and superior civilisation to the West.[...]An accumulating pile of research using DNA from both ancient human remains and modern people indicates strongly that, beginning around 2000BC, north-west India was indeed infused with new blood. The newcomers appear to have shared the same roots in what is now southern Russia as did the invaders of a similar-sized peninsula to the west called Europe. Strikingly, too, the genetic markers identifying this group seem to be far more prevalent among modern north Indian Brahmins than among other Indians.Because of the difficulty in collecting ancient DNA, such research has until recently relied on relatively few samples. But an international team of 92 scholars, including David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University who has pioneered techniques to analyse DNA more quickly and precisely, is set to publish data recovered from 362 “ancient individuals” from across South and Central Asia. Among their conclusions: there was probably an early migration of agriculturalists into India from what is now Iran, around 4000BC, and this was followed two millennia later—just before the Vedic Age—by a large influx from what is now southern Russia.
The origin of the Dravidian language family, consisting of about 80 varieties spoken by 220 million people across southern and central India and surrounding countries, can be dated to about 4,500 years ago. This estimate is based on new linguistic analyses by an international team, including researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, that used data collected first-hand from native speakers representing all previously reported Dravidian subgroups. These findings, published in Royal Society Open Science, match well with earlier linguistic and archaeological studies.
The Indian government is getting more serious about using blockchain technology into the growing digital economy of the country. But this does not mean it is going soft on cryptocurrencies.“Distributed ledger system or the block chain technology allows organization of any chain of records or transactions without the need of intermediaries,” said finance minister Arun Jaitely while presenting the Union Budget 2018-19 in Parliament on Thursday.“The Government does not consider crypto-currencies legal tender or coin and will take all measures to eliminate use of these crypto-assets in financing illegitimate activities or as part of the payment system. The government will explore use of block chain technology proactively for ushering in digital economy.”
The Indian Navy is moving ahead with a big-ticket proposal for acquiring its third aircraft carrier which is expected to cost around Rs 1.6 lakh crore along with the additional component of 57 fighter aircraft.The Navy has one operational aircraft carrier in the INS Vikramaditya while another one, INS Vikrant, is under construction at the Cochin Shipyard Limited (CSL) and is expected to join service in the next few years.“The Navy is planning to field its Rs 70,000 crore proposal before the defence ministry in near future which will cost around Rs 1.6 lakh crore at the approval stage itself along with the fighter plane component and the actual costs will go higher further as the programme moves ahead,” government sources told Mail Today.The Navy has plans of buying 57 twin-engine fighter planes for the third aircraft carrier for which American F-18 and French Dassault Rafale are in the race.“If one goes by the cost of the 36 Rafales acquired for the Air Force, the 57 planes are not going to cost us less than Rs 90,000-95,000 crore,” the sources said.
The launch of the next Moon mission could be just four months away. India plans to return to the Moon in a big way with the ambitious Chandrayaan-2, which includes an orbiter, lander, and a small rover. If it all succeeds, it will be India's first soft landing on another world, and only the second such landing since the end of the Apollo and Luna era. For India, landing success would be "a stepping stone for future exploration missions to other planets," according to Indian Space Research Organisation Satellite Centre (ISAC) director M. Annadurai.
