MANORAMA NEWS CONCLAVE 2023

Will Chandrayaan 3's Pragyan return from the dead? Somanath says wait and see

Kochi: It is possible that Pragyan has not fallen into an eternal sleep.
On September 3, 14 days after Chandrayaan 3's Vikram lander soft-landed on the surface of the Earth, Pragyan went to sleep. The ISRO had earlier announced that the Vikram lander and Pragyan rover, the 26kg six-wheeled rat-like vehicle that was designed to probe the moon's surface, were designed only for lunar daytime, which is equivalent to 14 days on Earth.

It was said that Pragyan would not withstand extremely low temperatures. However, ISRO chairman S Somanath feels that Pragyan, like all mass heroes, would come back from the dead.

At the Manorama News Conclave 2023 at Kochi on Thursday, Somanath was restrained in his prediction but sounded confident. "We were aware of the risks involved if the lander and rover went to sleep one night. Now it is sleeping peacefully. Let us not disturb it. When it wants to get up on its own, it will," he said while speaking on the topic 'India's Dream Space in Space'.

Somanath hinted that he was not being unreasonable when he held out the hope. "There is reason to hope," he said. "When we had tested the rover at minus 200 degree Celsius, we had found that it worked," he said. If the prevailing logic is that Pragyan's heart would stop in extreme cold, the ISRO chairman now said that tests conducted by the ISRO had fully convinced the organisation that Pragyan could shake off its slumber and come back to life.

Still, he wants to be realistic. "After these long days, the radiation it has been exposed to and the tremors that it could have suffered during the landing, it perhaps could be difficult for Pragyan to recover. So it is hard to predict," Somanath said.

Mission accomplished
Even if Pragyan fails to recover from sleep, Somanath is not worried. "The main objective of the Chandrayaan-3 mission was soft landing (which the Vikram lander successfully executed), and the experiments that take place in the next 14 days. We have collected enough data," he said.

In short, Chandrayaan-3 has successfully played its role. "Now we are trying to explore the scientific data that has been collected from this mission. The massive amounts of data we have collected are now stored in our scientific data centre," Somanath said.

Waiting for Chandrayaan's secrets
What this data hides will take a long time to uncover. For perspective, Somanath said the analysis of the data collected by Chandrayaan-I was published only a week ago.

"It is after many years that we could detect new patterns. It is only when we correlate our findings with measurements of others that new ideas emerge," the ISRO chairman said.

He said it was accidentally, and after a long time, that the presence of water was discovered on the lunar surface. "So we can never know when the data we had collected will throw up a scientific outcome," he said.

However, Somanath is confident that the scientific truths revealed by Chandrayaan 3 would be of far greater significance than those revealed by Chandrayaan 1. "In Chandrayaan-I, we collected data through remote sensing, by orbiting at a distance around the moon. In Chandrayaan-3, there is in situ collection of data. We are collecting information from the ground for the first time," he said.

India's Apollo mission
Gaganyaan is Somanath's next big challenge. The objective of India's first spaceflight mission is to take humans to the Earth's orbit and safely return them back. The mission hopes to demonstrate India's human spaceflight capability by launching a crew of 3 members to an orbit of 400 km and then returning them back in a three-day mission.

"But to achieve this, there are a number of steps to be taken. One, we know how to manufacture a rocket but to take a human in this, its safety and reliability have to be scaled up. We call it human rating," Somanath said.

Two, it requires a manned space shuttle. "The seats have to be very special. They have to be provided oxygen and water. Human waste has to be removed. Temperature and vibrations should be controlled. These were never part of our sphere of expertise. Now it is gradually becoming part of of ISRO's work culture," he said.

Three, if some accident befalls the rocket we should be able to save the crew. "So for that, we require a crew escape system. On top of this, we need an intelligence system that could automatically control all of these processes. We should derive a complex algorithm for this," Somanath said.

The unmanned flight on October 21 is one of the many steps towards the goal of a human flight to space. Integrated airdrop tests, test vehicle missions and the pad abort test have already been done.

Now, the first unmanned flight will test the safety and functioning of the Crew Escape System. Somanath hopes for a 2024 launch of Gaganyaan.

"We always prepare a success-oriented schedule. We go ahead with the hope that our planned tests will succeed. If not, there would be delays. Corrective actions will take time," he said.

Somanath has been involved in the Gaganyaan Mission right from its inception. He was the chairman of the committee that supervised the spacecraft's overall design. He was the VSSC director when he led the design team. All design and engineering-related aspects of the Crew Escape System were cleared by the committee chaired by Somanath. "My passion is in design," he said.

He is also working on the certification process for the spacecraft. Like any aircraft, Somanath said a rocket too requires certification. However, such a certification process does not exist. He is drawing up such a new process.

Crew Escape, India style
The Crew Escape System is fully indigenously developed. Nonetheless, Somanath said that ISRO had learned from existing models. "Even Apollo (America's human spaceflight programme in 1968) had a Crew Escape System. Russia has, and many others too," he said.

"These models, documents and analyses are all available. But these materials are very vague, they do not have things that we need to know," he said.

The reason why ISRO had to build a system completely from scratch with in-house expertise.