ISRO puts off SpaDeX mission to Jan 9

Bengaluru/New Delhi: The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has postponed its key Space Docking Experiment (SpaDeX) mission by a couple of days to Janu-ary 9, saying that this has been done to run some more ground simula-tions based on an “abort scenario” that has been identified. A successful docking experiment will make India the fourth country in the world — after the US, Russia, and China — to have the capability. The satellite was launched on December 30, with the docking initially planned for January 7 forenoon.

“This has been done so that the accuracy may be improved after per-forming some simulations on the ground,” said an official on Monday.

A video of the satellite extending its docking ring has been released by the space agency. The extended docking ring is the region where both the spacecraft will connect in space. The docking mechanism for the ex-periment is androgynous — the docking system is the same on both sat-ellites, with either having the capability of acting as the chaser or target satellite.

The mission will see two small 220-kg satellites — the SDX01 Chaser and SDX02 Target — coming together, with the Chaser slowly reducing the distance between the satellites progressively to 5 km, 1.5 km, 500 m, 225 m, 15 m, 3 m, finally joining with the Target satellite on the day of the experiment.