ISRO’s unmanned crew module reaches Chennai

Chennai: Three days after it was recovered from sea, ISRO’s unmanned crew module was today brought to Kamarajar Port at Ennore near here on board a Coast Guard ship.

Coast Guard ship ICGS Samudra Paheredar brought the three-tonne weighing crew module to the port and it was later shipped to Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota, some 100 km from here, Coast Guard sources said.

ISRO had earlier said that after being brought to Sriharikota, the module would be taken to Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre at Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala for further study.

Inching towards realising India’s ambition to send humans to space, ISRO had on December 18 successfully tested an unmanned crew module on board an experimental mission of its heaviest rocket GSLV Mark-III that blasted off from Sriharikota.

Around 730 seconds after it lifted off at 9.30 AM from the Second Launch Pad of the Satish Dhawan Space Centre here, the crew module — CARE (Crew Module Atmospheric Re-entry Experiment) — splashed down into the Bay of Bengal, after separating from the LVM3-X rocket with active S200 and L110 propulsion stages.

Few hours later, Indian Coast Guard ship recovered the module from the Bay of Bengal off Andaman and Nicobar Islands the same day and proceeded to Chennai.