I consider rockets like a baby, says Isro chairman Somnath

Hyderabad: Expressing his deep love and association with rockets, Isro chairman S Somanath on Saturday said he considers the launch vehicles as babies.

Somanath said he enjoyed the launch of Phase-I of Chandrayaan-3 on Friday, while adding that he had gone through the entire data and marvelled at "how beautiful the rocket was".

Isro on Friday successfully launched its third moon mission, this time a far more complicated 41-day voyage to reach the lunar south pole where no other country has gone before. The space agency said the technically challenging soft landing on lunar surface, which Chandrayaan-2 could not achieve, has been planned for 5.47 pm on August 23.

Delivering his address at the 12th Convocation of IIT Hyderabad in neighbouring Sangareddy district, Somanath said "As an engineer and scientist, I have a love for rockets. I consider the rocket like a baby, seeing its birth, its growth, its problems of growth, its emotions and developing a deep understanding of its mechanics and dynamics and its life as such."

Referring to the previous Chandrayaan-2 launch, he said it had almost 2,000 measurements that were coordinated which were in the form of graphs and curves. He further said Isro converts thousands of measurements into curves and study models and explains how it performs.

"For example, the last Chandrayaan rocket, we had almost 2,000 measurements and finally they came to us as graphs, curves. Like a doctor looking at the ECG, we look at these graphs. We have created an attachment to those curves and graphs and we can understand by looking at ups and downs what exactly is its speed... how its going. This is something very interesting to understand a machine and yield a sense of it," he said.

On human space travel, he said everybody asks him why human beings should travel to space and explore the planets and why robots can not do this job? (PTI)