By NNN-PTI,
Thiruvananthapuram, India : With the success of Chandrayaan-1, the country’s first moon mission, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is planning a manned space mission as a first step to manned moon mission.
“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,” ISRO Chairman G Madhavan Nair said delivering a lecture on ‘India’s Recent Space Achievements’ here on Sunday.
The government approval for the mission was yet to be received and ISRO was planning the programme by 2015, Nair said.
ISRO was also in the process of developing technologies for a manned moon mission and it would take more than six to seven years to develop those technologies, he said adding our effort is to achieve the milestone by the time the proposed next manned moon mission of USA and China materialise in 2020″.
On the next Space programme of ISRO, Nair said government has accorded sanction for the Chandrayaan-II mission that would be launched in 2012. The work on Chandrayaan-II had started, he said. Under the programme, a robotic lunar rover would smooth land on the moon and conduct experiments, he said.
‘Adithya’, was the another space programme in the pipeline, he said. Under this programme, effort would be made to study the Solar System by launching a satellite and the same would be stationed within the earth orbit, he said.
“There was no plan to send any satellite to Sun,” he said referring to media reports that ISRO was planning a Sun Mission.