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The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said it successfully conducted the landing experiment of Pushpak Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) at Aeronautical Test Range in Chitradurga district in Karnataka on Friday morning.
The winged vehicle called Pushpak landed precisely on the runway after being released from 4.5 kilometre altitude.
This is ISRO’s second series of RLV landing experiment and this time, the RLV exhibited autonomous landing capability and undertook more difficult manoeuvres with dispersions.
Notably, the high-speed landing conditions and approach used by RLV while returning from space was simulated during the mission. ISRO Chairman S Somanath appreciated the team for successful mission.
Last year in April, ISRO conducted the series of experiments with RLV-TD. It was part of efforts at “developing essential technologies for a fully reusable launch vehicle to enable low-cost access to space”.
ISRO’s RLV-TD looking like an aircraft consisted of a fuselage, a nose cap, double delta wings, and twin vertical tails.
Back in 2016, the space agency conducted the maiden test flight of RLV Demonstrator at Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh. The experiment involved sending a winged spacecraft on a rocket powered by conventional solid booster (HS9) engine used by ISRO into space. The spacecraft traveled at a speed of Mach 5 (five times the speed of sound) when re-entering the earth’s orbit and traveled a distance of 450 km before splashdown in the Bay of Bengal. It was ISRO’s first attempt to develop a space vehicle that can fly numerous times into space like aeroplanes.
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