Challakere is a town in Karnataka which is roughly 3.5 hour drive North East of Bengaluru. This is a place where a ₹2,700 crore plan to build India’s Human Space Flight Center (HSFC). This was where some of the tests for Chandrayaan 3 are being done.
Tender Notice to clear Bellary Jali
As usual, this news comes not from ISRO but from a tender notice posted on ISRO’s website. Based on this, I looked at the area on Google Maps. I found a few things that I shared on r/ISRO. As is usual, this is not a new discovery.
This is land allocated to ISRO in Science City. Hence, you can see the campuses for Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and even Bhaba Atomic Research Station (BARC).
You can also see the plans that were shared for the construction of this land here. Essentially, the land where we did these tests will be built over by the HSFC.
Chandrayaan-3 tests
These craters are for what are called the Lander Sensor Performance Test (LSPT). LSPT-1 and LSPT-2 were conducted for Chandrayaan-2. The tender is for clearing the green swathes that you see. It is apparently full of a shrub called Bellary Jali which needs to be cleaned up before tests for Chandrayaan-3 can be conducted.
Details of LSPT-1 and LSPT-2 were shared in Upagrah Apr-Jun 2017 issue (archived in Google Docs by u/Ohsin). This is the in-house magazine for U R Rao Satellite Center (URSC).
The test involves flying a Beechcraft Super King Air B-200 belonging to the National Remote Sensing Center (NRSC) over the craters made for the purpose. The plane flew from 500 m to 7 km in altitude to simulate various landing conditions. They also flew early in the morning to get the same lighting conditions as on the landing site on the Moon.
RLV Landing Experiment near Chitradurga
There was mention of a Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) Landing Experiment at Chitradurga.
Interesting term in the picture above is the pseudolite (pseudo-satellite).
While exploring the surrounding of Challakere, I spotted this, which could be a possible runway to which the RLV will glide and land on.
This blog post is a small effort to read documents and share with you the possible rabbit holes. Following them is up to you.
Parallel Spirals 