Isro lines up three space exploration projects

The projects include ASTROSAT, Chandrayaan-2 and Aditya

Indian Space Research Organisation's (Isro) space exploration projects in the next three years includes a multi-wavelength astronomy satellite ‘ASTROSAT’ aimed at studying celestial sources over a wide spectral region covering Visible, Ultraviolet, Soft X-rays and Hard X-ray bands.

The second project is Chandrayaan-2 mission, which comprises of an Indian Orbiter, Lander and Rover. The Orbiter with scientific payloads will orbit around the moon. The scientific payloads onboard the Orbiter, Lander and Rover are expected to perform mineralogical and elemental studies of the lunar surface.

The third project is a scientific mission ‘Aditya’ for solar studies to understand the physical processes that heat the solar corona.

The Minister of State in the Ministry of Personnel, PG & Pensions and in the Prime Minister’s Office Jitendra Singh said in a written reply in the Lok Sabha today that ISRO is not facing shortage of engineers/scientists/physicists to fill up the sanctioned posts.

He said, as a part of the long term capacity build up strategies for developing high quality human resources in space science area, the Department of Space/ISRO has introduced fellowship schemes for post-graduate students pursuing space science and atmospheric research in eight Universities in the Country;

A one time financial grant has been given to set up Space Science laboratories in select eight universities in the country, introduction of research fellowship to enable scientists from universities and other academic and research institutions to visit and conduct research work at national laboratories, academic/research institutions.

The Indian Space Research Organisation has set-up a fellowship programme at an American University and has setup an endowed fellowship programme at the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), California, USA.

This fellowship programme is established in honour of Dr Satish Dhawan, who was the former Chairman of Isro.

The fellowship provides an opportunity every year to one meritorious graduating student from the Aerospace Department of the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram to be sponsored by the Department of Space, to pursue Masters in Aerospace Engineering at Caltech.