It’s not just the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) that is building bigger, more powerful rockets. Students at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST), ISRO’s space academy here, have begun work on ‘Vyom II,’ a heftier successor to India’s first ‘student rocket’ launched three years ago. ‘Vyom II’ is to be launched in a year’s time from the sounding rocket launching station at Thumba, IIST director Dr K S Dasgupta said. “The students have started serious work on the new project. The sounding rocket will have a payload capability of 20 kg, will be taller than Vyom I and will have a higher trajectory,’’ Dr. Dasgupta said. Instruments used for atmospheric studies will form the payload on Vyom II. Indian Space Research Organisation has been launching sounding rockets right from the 1960s for studying the earth’s upper atmosphere using rocket-borne instruments. These small rockets, which use solid propellants, are shot off from either the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) here or the Sriharikota spaceport in Andhra Pradesh. But Vyom I, launched on May 11, 2012, from Thumba, had created history by being India’s first student-built sounding rocket. Standing just 2.31 metres tall, the rocket reached a height of 16 kms before falling into the sea. ISRO’s successful flight-testing of the India’s biggest rocket, the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mk-III (GSLV Mk-III), in December 2014 has given fresh impetus to IIST’s own project. With Vyom II, IIST students plan to take a higher leap into the skies. ‘Vyom II,’ which will have a single stage, will soar to a height of 70 kms, the same as some of ISRO’s lesser sounding rockets. “A novel aspect of the current effort is to design this rocket using MDO (Multi-Disciplinary Design Optimisation), where the disciplines of aerodynamics, solid motor propulsion, structural analysis and flight mechanics are optimised to get an optimal vehicle design. Last week, a paper based on this work was accepted by International Journal Of Advances In Engineering Sciences And Applied Mathematics, a journal published by Springer,’’ Dr. Dasgupta said. Earlier, a paper based on the study had won the second best paper award at the ASET-2014 conference organised by the Aeronautical Society of India, he said.
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