July launch for ISRO skylab

AN INDIAN laboratory will go up in space in June-July next for trials that could throw up a new class of alloys and drugs. A 525 kg capsule built on a shoestring budget of just Rs 50 crore will use the micro-gravity conditions of space to make long-lasting and lightweight alloys. Another set of tests will focus on rolling out new materials for spacecraft, aircraft and drugs as well. Monitoring the studies would be the Indian Space Research Organisation, the National Metallurgical Laboratory, Jamshedpur, and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

AN INDIAN laboratory will go up in space in June-July next for trials that could throw up a new class of alloys and drugs.

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A 525 kg capsule built on a shoestring budget of just Rs 50 crore will use the micro-gravity conditions of space to make long-lasting and lightweight alloys.

Another set of tests will focus on rolling out new materials for spacecraft, aircraft and drugs as well. Monitoring the studies would be the Indian Space Research Organisation, the National Metallurgical Laboratory, Jamshedpur, and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

The next mission, “perhaps after two years, will look at life sciences. Say how cells function and multiply in micro-gravity,” G Madhavan Nair, chairman, ISRO said.

The capsule will be injected into space by the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. Called the Space Recovery Experiment (SRE), it will generate data to design a container for a future manned trip to space.

It is intended to demonstrate the capability to recover an orbiting space capsule. It would also test systems like the reusable thermal protection, navigation, guidance and control, hypersonic aero-thermodynamics, management of communication blackout, deceleration and floatation system and recovery operations.