The ambitious Gaganyaan human space flight mission's test spacecraft with crew safety-related payloads successfully launched from Sriharikota on Saturday. The crew escape system and crew module during the brief test flight sequence at an altitude of 17 km, and they safely came down into the sea around 10 km from Sriharikota on India's eastern coast.
Later, the Navy would bring back the crew module from the Bay of Bengal.
“I am very happy to announce the successful accomplishment of the TV-D1 Mission,” Isro chief S Somanath said soon after the splash.
"The purpose of this mission was to demonstrate the crew escape system for the Gaganyaan programme through a test vehicle demonstration in which the vehicle went up to a Mach number, which is slightly above the speed of sound and initiated an abort condition for the crew escape system to function," he said.
“The crew escape system took the crew module away from the vehicle and subsequent operations including the touch-down at the sea have been very well accomplished. And we have a confirmation of the data for all of this,” he added.
The test flight's objectives were to evaluate the test vehicle's subsystems, and crew escape mechanisms, including various separation systems, and crew module characteristics, and demonstrate higher-altitude deceleration systems and their recovery.
A flaw that was discovered seconds before the intended launch at 8.45 a.m. led to an earlier termination and rescheduling of the mission.
Explaining the reason for holding the launch, the Isro chairman said,
"After going through the nominal lift-off process, there was a hold issued by the ground computer, which is called the automatic launch sequence computer, that detected a non-conformance for allowing the engine to continue the thrusting to go further. This happened due to a monitoring anomaly in the system, which is why we could identify it very fast and correct it."
The aim of Gaganyaan, India's first human spaceflight project, is to launch a crew of three people into a 400km orbit for a three-day mission and return them safely to Earth. Although a schedule has not been released, it has been anticipated that the mission will launch from Sriharikota, the nation's main spaceport, before 2024.
