Context: The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully carried out the landing mission of its Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) named 'Pushpak' in the Reusable Launch Vehicle – Landing EXperiment (RLV LEX-02) on March 22, 2024.
Major Highlights:
- The RLV LEX-02 landing experiment, is the second of the series, was conducted at Aeronautical Test Range (ATR), Chitradurga in Karnataka.
- The RLV-LEX-01 mission was accomplished in April 2023.
- RLV-LEX-02 demonstrated the autonomous landing capability of RLV from off-nominal initial conditions at release from Chinook Helicopter.
- Pushpak Viman is a winged vehicle built like a space plane/ shuttle which has the capacity to take the payloads to the Low Earth Orbit and return it back to the Earth.
- The vehicle was lifted by an Indian Airforce Chinook helicopter and was released from 4.5 km altitude.
- After release at a distance of 4 km from the runway, Pushpak autonomously approached the runway, and landed precisely using its brake parachute, landing gear brakes and nose wheel steering system.
- This mission successfully simulated the approach and high-speed landing conditions of RLV returning from space.
Significance:
- With the mission, ISRO has re-validated indigenously developed technologies in the areas of navigation, control systems, landing gear and deceleration systems essential for performing a high-speed autonomous landing of a space-returning vehicle. This would be a critical step towards developing future Orbital Re-entry missions.
- Developing essential technologies for a fully reusable launch vehicle aims to enable low-cost access to space.
- Further, the vehicle can be configured to act as a flying test bed to evaluate various technologies, namely, hypersonic flight, autonomous landing and powered cruise flight.