GSLV MK-III launch date to be fixed on Tuesday

Tribune News Service

Bengaluru, December 13

The Mission Readiness Review (MRR) of the experimental flight of GSLV MK-III — the most powerful rocket built by Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to date — will meet at Sriharikota on December 16 and take a call on the date of its launch.

ISRO sources said the launch was expected to take place two days later on December 18. “If everything was found satisfactory, the countdown for the launch will begin after the meeting of the MRR on December 16 and the launch will take place in the morning of December 18,” the sources said.

The launch will be from the ISRO’s spaceport at Sriharikota near Chennai.

The GSLV MK-III is designed to put four-tonne communication satellites into orbit. If the experiment is successful, it will ensure that India does not need to hire foreign commercial launch service any more for putting its heavier communication satellites in space.

For future manned mission, this launcher will carry the Indian astronauts to space. Taking this into account, the forthcoming launch will also carry the crew module payload (Crew Module Atmospheric Re-entry Experiment or CARE).

The rocket weighing about 640 tonnes is now being subjected to tests. The rocket will be equipped with a dummy cryogenic engine that will simulate the weight and other characteristics of the flight version. The crew module will separate at a height of 125 km from earth and then descend in the Bay of Bengal near the Andaman Islands.