ISRO: Manned mission in earth orbit to precede manned lunar mission

Thiruvananthapuram: A manned space mission into the earth's orbit will precede a manned lunar mission, ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair said in the course of a talk on 'India's Recent Space Achievements' here on Sunday. Though government sanction for the manned space mission was yet to be accorded, ISRO was working towards a 2015 launch, Nair said.

"Sending man to moon is a very complicated mission. So, as a first step, we plan to develop an Indian spacecraft that will take astronauts across the earth and bring them back," Nair said.

He also said that ISRO was in the process of developing technologies for the manned lunar mission and it would take around six to seven years to develop such technologies. In this regard he mentioned that ISRO's aim was to mature the programme at around the same time, by 2020, when USA and China would also be lining up their manned lunar missions.

Nair also revealed that with the success of the Chandrayaan-1 behind it, and government sanction now available, work on the Chandrayaan-2 mission was afoot keeping in mind a launch target of 2012.

The mission would endeavour to soft land a robotic lunar rover, which would conduct experiments, he said.

'Adithya' was another space programme in the pipeline, Nair said, which would study the solar system. A satellite by this name would be placed in the earth's orbit, he said.