Bengaluru: ISRO has succeeded in successfully docking the two Space Docking Experiment (SpadX) satellites for the second time, an achievement that will give the data of space agency to further improve its technology in future.
ISRO president V Narayanan told TOI, “This is an important achievement and further activities are being planned.” Saying that the docking operation was “smooth”, he said that his team managed to do so as it was a “child’s game”.
Union Minister Jitendra Singh announced the docking and said: “Gladly, the second docking of the satellites has been completed. As informed earlier, the PSLV-C60/SpadX mission was launched on 30 December 2024. After this, the satellites were first successfully docked by 6.20 pm on January 16.”
ISRO is yet to be issued an official statement with a details of another docking. According to sources, the second docking was posted at 7 pm on Sunday (April 20) and the operation was “more accurately than the first attempt”. “These are important lessons,” one of them said.
Between March 13 and the second docking operations, ISRO used a “rolling” or “rotating” in late March, which was first reported by Toi. At that time, confirming the success of the operation, Narayanan had said that more experiments were in the store.
TOI reported immediately after docking that ISRO would try more docking experiments using the same satellites. At the end of March, Narayanan repeated it and told TOI: “… I have a lot of proponent in the satellites … I have only told [the teams] One thing, please do everything [on] Imitation of land [first]Let us be very careful. Let us not make any mistake because the treasure of data can be generated [through various experiments],
Rolling experiment, compared to Chandrayaan -3 “hop”, which uses the space agency held on the moon in terms of learning for future missions, helped ISRO to validate many software, ground station control and more.
On January 16, ISRO’s first docking was the first step towards mastery in Iso Iso, which is important for many future missions, including the Chandrayaan -4 Sample Return Mission to Moon and Human Spaceflight Mission.
And, the second docking is another step. ISRO will still need to do a dock in various situations, some of which will be strive as part of the current mission. The Space Agency is expected to operate more docking as part of SpadX.
