Scope of the help

Gaganyaan is India’s first human spaceflight programme. It presently consists of three deliberate missions: two uncrewed missions adopted by one crewed mission. ESA will help all three missions.

“The Community Operations Centre at ESA’s ESOC mission management centre in Germany will coordinate a sequence of radio antennas within the international European House Monitoring community (Estrack) that may allow ISRO to trace, monitor and command the Gaganyaan crew module all through every mission,” mentioned Octave Procope-Mamert, Head of Floor Facility Operations at ESA.

The primary Gaganyaan mission, presently foreseen for 2025, can be supported by ESA’s 15 m antenna in Kourou, French Guiana.

Following missions can even be supported by antennas owned by the German Aerospace Heart (DLR) and the Spanish Nationwide Institute for Aerospace Expertise (INTA), all linked by way of ESOC.

Subsequent steps

A suitcase-sized mannequin of the Gaganyaan radio tools will quickly arrive at ESOC in Germany for radio frequency compatibility testing on the web site’s Floor Phase Reference Facility. The compatibility checks will be certain that the spacecraft’s radio transmitter and receiver can successfully talk with ESA’s antenna in Kourou.

ESA and ISRO have an extended historical past of spaceflight cooperation. Current highlights embrace ESA’s help to ISRO’s Chandrayaan-3 Moon mission in 2023.

ESA’s floor stations are additionally downlinking the majority of the information gathered by ISRO’s Aditya-L1 photo voltaic observatory all through its mission to review the Solar and the origins of area climate.

ISRO, in the meantime, lately oversaw the launch of ESA’s Proba-3 mission, the third mission of the Proba sequence to be launched from India.

The 2 area companies are dedicated to deepening this collaboration sooner or later, with ESA’s help to ISRO’s human spaceflight programme seen as a major step ahead.