BHUBANESWAR:
Indian Space Research Organisation (
Isro) chairman
K Sivan on Saturday said that Gaganyaan, India's maiden manned mission to space which is expected to be launched by December 2021, is now the highest priority of the space agency.
He said Gaganyaan is extremely important for India as it will boost the science and technology capacity of the country.
“By December 2020, we will have our first unmanned mission of
human spaceflight.
The second unmanned mission is targeted for July 2021. For the first time, we will send Indians to space in an Indian rocket by December 2021,” he said while addressing 8th convocation of IIT Bhubaneswar.
Sivan also spoke about Aditya- L1 mission to study the sun and other programmes in the pipeline.
Talking about
Chandrayaan-2, the Isro chief said that the mission has been 98 per cent successful with the orbiter performing very well.
"The orbiter's payload systems are functioning well. Certain payloads in the orbiter are first of their kind. The moon mission is 98 per cent successful,” he added.
On failing to communicate with the 'Vikram' lander, Sivan said they could not do much about that.
Sivan, however, said that the life span of Chandrayaan 2 is 7.5 years. “Don’t you think it is a success? It is really a big success. Except soft landing of lander Vikram, everything was okay,” he said.
Sivan told students not to think of failures as obstacles but opportunities to learn.
“How many times ISRO faced failure in development of launching of vehicles, but these failures did not make obstacles in our path. We used these failures as learning opportunities. If you don’t take risk, there is a chance of never achieving significant in life,” he said, adding, “Make interesting or fantastic mistakes, but learn from the mistakes and make glorious things.”
He also gave away awards to meritorious students to scholars and students of the institute.