ISRO docks 2 SpaDeX satellites for second time
Union Minister Jitendra Singh said that the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has successfully performed the second docking of satellites as part of its Spadex missions..
The Union Minister further said that more experiments are planned in the next two weeks.
“Glad to inform that the second docking of satellites has been accomplished successfully,” Singh, the minister of state for science and technology, atomic energy and space, said in a post on ‘X’.
He recalled that the PSLV-C60/Space Docking Experiment (SPADEX) mission was launched on December 30, 2024.
Thereafter satellites were successfully docked for the first time on January 16 and successfully undocked on March 13, the minister said.
“Further experiments are planned in the next two weeks,” Singh added.
Later, in a statement, ISRO said the docking experiment of the SPADEX satellites (SDX-01 and SDX-02) for the second time was successfully carried out on April 20 at 08.20 pm.
“Subsequently, power transfer from SDX-02 to SDX-01 satellite as well as vice versa was also exercised and accomplished on April 21. The experiment involved operating a heater element in one of the satellites through power from the other satellite,” it said.
The space agency said the duration of power transfer was approximately four minutes and the performance of the satellites was as expected.
“In the second attempt, docking was completed with full autonomy from an inter-satellite distance of 15 metres till docking. In the first docking attempt, an additional hold point was manually exercised at an inter-satellite distance of 3 metres,” the statement read.