April 3, 2023: Important Current Affairs
ISRO succeeds in landing Reusable Launch Vehicle The space agency conducted the ‘Reusable Launch Vehicle Autonomous Landing Mission (RLV LEX)’ at the Aeronautical Test Range of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) in Karnataka’s Chitradurga district. According to ISRO, the RLV took off as the underslung load of a Chinook Helicopter of the Indian Air Force and, after reaching an altitude of 4.6 km, was released for carrying out an autonomous landing on a runway. ISRO said the experiment was carried out under the exact conditions of a space re-entry vehicle’s landing such as “high speed, unmanned, precise landing from the same return path”. The RLV is essentially a space plane with a low lift-to-drag ratio, requiring an approach at high glide angles that necessitated a landing at high velocities of 350 kmph. ISRO first demonstrated the re-entry of its winged vehicle RLV-TD in its HEX Mission in May 2016. During that experiment, the vehicle had landed on a hypothetica…
