Avatar (spacecraft)
Avatar is a Reusable launch vehicle proposed and designed by India's premier defence research organisation Defence Research Development Organisation (DRDO) along with Indian space research organisation (ISRO) and other research institutions, which can be used for cheaper military and civilian satellite launches.
Concept
The idea is to develop a hyperplane vehicle that can take off from conventional airfields, collect air in the atmosphere on the way up, liquefy it, separate oxygen and store it on board for subsequent flight beyond the atmosphere. Avatar rlv was first announced in May 1998 at the Aero India 98 exhibition held at Bangalore. Air Commodore R. Gopalaswami suggested the name Avatar which means Aerobic Vehicle for hypersonic Aerospace Tranportation. It is planned to be the size of a MiG fighter and would be capable of delivering a 500 kg to 1000 kg payload to low earth orbit at very cheap rate for an estimated vehicle life of 100 launches.
Avatar is proposed to weighing only 25 tonnes in which 60 per cent of mass will be liquid hydrogen fuel. The Oxygen required by the vehicle for combustion is collected from the atmosphere, thus reducing the need to carry oxygen during launch. Avatar is said to be capable of entering into a 100-km orbit in a single stage and launching satellites weighing up to one tonne.
Operation
AVATAR would take off horizontally like conventional airplanes from conventional airstrips using turbo-ramjet engines that burn air and hydrogen or on top of transport aircraft. Once at a cruising altitude, the vehicle would be detached from carrier and it use scramjet propulsion to accelerate from Mach 4 to Mach 8.During these cruising phases, an on-board system will collect air from atmosphere and from which liquid oxygen will be separated and stored. The liquid oxygen collected then would be used in the final flight phase when the rocket engine burns the collected liquid oxygen and the carried hydrogen to attain orbit. The vehicle will be designed to permit at least a hundred re-entries into the atmosphere.
Development
The AVATAR is being developed by India's Defence Research and Development Organisation or DRDO. Air Commodore Raghavan Gopalaswami former chief of Bharat Dynamics Ltd, Hyderabad is heading the project. He coined the name and made the presentation on the space plane at the global conference on propulsion at Salt Lake City (USA) on July 10, 2001. Gopalaswami said the idea for Avatar originated from the work published by the Rand Corporation of the United States in 1987.
The AVATAR is currently only in the conceptual stage and an initial development budget of only $5 million is allocated. The project supporters claim that the vehicle can be built in ten years with total funding of under $2 billion with international assistance. Along with DRDO team development of critical technology components were undertaken by as many as 23 academic institutions (IITs, IISc etc) along with ISRO in India.Both the scramjet engine concept and the liquid oxygen collection process have already undergone successful tests at DRDO and at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. DRDO has approved further testing of the liquid oxygen process and assigned a team to conduct a detailed review of the vehicle’s design.
Currently DRDO plans to build and fly a scaled down version of Avatar, weighing just 3 tonnes at take off. To be built by a private company called CIM technologies by 2006, this mini-Avatar will not go into space but will demonstrate all technologies used in Avatar including oxygen collection. It is claimed that the real AVATAR would be viable by as early 2015 with international co-operation along with other countries working on this area. AVATAR design has already been patented in India and applications for registration of the design have been filed in patent offices in the United States, Germany, Russia and even China.
Future Plans
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) the space agency of india has completed the ground-level trials of the air-breathing engine and is preparing to move into more advanced stages of development. A technology demonstrator of a Avatar reusable launch vehicle a forerunner of the Indian version of a reusable space shuttle will take off in 2008.
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