ISRO presented its first ‘woman’ astronaut to an international gathering in Bangalore on Wednesday. Seated at a desk in a uniform and sporting her name on a custom-made ISRO identity badge, Vyommitra, introduced herself to ISRO Chairman K. Sivan and Principal Scientific Adviser K. Vijay Raghavan at the symposium on human space flight in Bangalore.
Crux of the Matter
Most international space missions send mannequins or humanoids in test flights before actually launching a human being into a mission. The most famous of these is Ivan Ivanovich, who flew in the USSR’s Vostok spacecraft in 1961 before Yuri Gagarin.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had mentioned about India’s human spaceflight mission in his Independence Day address in 2018.
Vyommitra gets her name from two Sanskrit words : Vyom which means space and Mitra, meaning friend. She will fly onboard the first two flights of the mission. Only the third Gaganyaan flight will have a ‘human’ crew.
Designed at ISRO’s Inertial Systems Unit in Thiruvananthapuram, Vyommitra is a half humanoid, which means she does not have legs. However, she is interactive enough and will be able to help check the systems in the crew module including temperature, pressure levels and oxygen availability.
The model on display is only a prototype of the robot lady who will fly out by the end of December 2020. She will have some level of autonomy to communicate with the ground station.
Curiopedia
Human spaceflight or manned spaceflight is space travel with a crew or passengers aboard the spacecraft. Spacecraft carrying people may be operated directly, by human crew, or it may be either remotely operated from ground stations on Earth or be autonomous, able to carry out a specific mission with no human involvement. The first human in space was Yuri Gagarin, who flew the Vostok 1 spacecraft, launched by the Soviet Union on 12 April 1961 as part of the Vostok program. Humans have flown to the Moon nine times from 1968 to 1972 in the United States Apollo program, and have been continuously present in space for 19 years and 84 days on the International Space Station. All human spaceflight has so far been human-piloted, with the first autonomous human-carrying spacecraft under design starting in 2015. Russia and China have human spaceflight capability with the Soyuz program and the Shenzhou program. In the United States, SpaceShipTwo reached the edge of space in 2018; this was the first crewed spaceflight from the US since the Space Shuttle retired in 2011. More Info
Curated Coverage
Comments