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Mahesh

19/11/23 13:45 PM IST

India’s space programme turns 60

In News
  • On the evening of November 21, 1963, a 715-kg Nike Apache rocket soared from a small launch pad on the beach-head at Thumba, a fishing village on the outskirts of Thiruvananthapuram.
Nike Apache launch
  • The Nike Apache launch was an international effort under the United Nations.
  • The rocket came from the U.S., the sodium vapour payload from France, and the range clearance from an MI-4 helicopter from the then Soviet Union.
  • The rocket and payload engineers were Indians.
  • The rocket had been mated with the payload in St. Mary Magdalene Church, Thumba, which had been taken over by the national government.
  • The parish priest’s house served as the mission control centre.
India Space Programme
  • India launched its first truly indigenous rocket on February 22, 1969.
  • Vasant Gowariker, who later became the Director of Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thumba, said it was “a pencil-sized rocket”.
  • On November 21, 2003, ISRO celebrated 40 years of Indian rocketry at the VSSC.
  • Today, India is an influential spacefaring nation.
  • On July 14, 2023, in its M-4 mission, a Launch Vehicle Mark 3 (LVM-3) weighing 640 tonnes lifted off from the second launch pad at Sriharikota and placed the four-tonne Chandrayaan-3 composite module into an orbit around the earth.
  • On August 23, 2023, the Chandrayaan-3 lander, named ‘Vikram’, soft-landed on the moon, and a few hours later, a rover named ‘Pragyaan’ rolled out onto the lunar surface. The success made a new kind of history for India.
Strength of India
  • On the strength of its rockets, India has been able to build and launch satellites for a variety of applications, including remote-sensing, weather-forecasting, communications, navigation, surveillance, tele-education, cartography, prospecting resources, etc.
  • It has also embarked on deep-space science missions to study the moon, Mars, the Sun, and distant stars.
  • It can build any type of launch vehicle and any type of satellite. Using these launch vehicles, it can put its satellites into different types of orbits.
Source- The Hindu

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