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Nilgiri

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Last week, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully tested the crew escape system for Gaganyaan, India’s ambitious manned space mission. What is the project and what will it mean for India’s space ambitions? Here’s an explainer.

 

Nilgiri

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Basically its almost impossible to design a battery to withstand near absolute zero for this period of time (half a month). Nothing is 100%, i.e there is likely some high confidence interval that the batteries and capacitors etc involved could not survive this (found out during cold freeze research and testing etc) but there is some finite small chance worth checking for anyway just in case.

There was no RTG etc like say found on voyager space probes (to provide a steady residual minimum temperature to critical payloads), likely the mass and other budgets would cascade by that and was deemed not worth it.

i.e the thermal management was never designed by its basis to survive the lunar night (and the mission was timed to make full use of the lunar day before it with this in mind tool).

Though it has now been revealed RTG tech demonstrators were employed aboard the CY-3 orbiter. So future lunar, martian and solar system explorer projects may involve landers and rovers with RTG onboard hopefully to have longer mission life @Rodeo @Gessler et al.

 

Nilgiri

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Marlii

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Screenshot_2023-11-18-14-15-31-57_f9ee0578fe1cc94de7482bd41accb329.jpg
Screenshot_2023-11-18-14-15-03-37_f9ee0578fe1cc94de7482bd41accb329.jpg
 

Nilgiri

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Basically we have confirmation now that LUPEX is separate mission to CY-4 (which will be done later).

LUPEX will be a joint mission with JAXA it seems (which is pretty much the best country India can cooperate with space if you look at what JAXA has developed in unique ways which they are very humble about).

CY-4 will involve a lunar sample return and two separate launches (one for the lunar mission component, the other for it to dock to on return and for re-entry to Earth). Very interesting mission design.
 

Nilgiri

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The success of the Chandrayaan-3 mission raises even more questions about our already mysterious Moon.

 

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Nilgiri

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Yes it is in the 5th slide of that thread summary. I suppose it hinges on how the cooperation goes with US..an extra if you will as segue after the Indian space station (there is commonality in docking standards after all in international space, so might as well leverage off US economy of scale at that point where possible).

But I do not foresee it as being contingent to Indian program for a human moon landing.

 

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Other important updates being: 1) US extending offer of cooperation in the Indian space station program (BAS) and 2) Proposal for a joint interplanetary mission (to Mars?) between ISRO-NASA.
 

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