Kineco Kaman contributes to India's third lunar mission

On July 14 at 2:35 p.m., the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO, Bengaluru) LVM-3-M4 launch vehicle successfully launched India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission rover into the sky from the Staish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC-SHAR) in Sriharikota, India. Kineco Kaman Composites (Goa, India) notes its contributions to this historic launch. 

Kineco Kaman Composites, a joint venture between Kineco Group and Kaman Aerospace Group, supplied four critical components which form part of the LVM3-M4 launch vehicle, namely:

• Composite equipment bay shroud (ESB) assembly
• ITSC closure plates
• ITSC, LOX and LH2 wire tunnel and bottom plate assembly
• FSA casings with carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) elements

Chandrayaan-3 is India’s third moon mission — a follow-on to Chandrayaan-2 — to demonstrate end-to-end capability in safe landing and roving on the lunar surface. It consists of an indigenous lander module (LM), propulsion module (PM) and a rover with an objective of developing and demonstrating new technologies required for interplanetary missions.

According to ISRO, the lander has the capability to soft land at a specified lunar site and deploy the rover, which will carry out in-situ chemical analysis of the lunar surface during the course of its mobility. The lander and the rover have scientific payloads to carry out experiments on the lunar surface.

Kineco Kaman’s space odyssey with the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) in India started in 2014 with the supply of 10 dual helix antennas for the Indian Regional Navigational Satellite (IRNSS) program. Now the company has proven to be the supplier of choice for ISRO-VSSC for their composite requirements.

Kineco Kaman’s expertise in manufacturing composite structural parts for space launch vehicles was further validated when it became India’s first private entity to successfully supply the EBS assembly used for the LVM3-M2/OneWeb India-1 mission (read this announcement for more details), which successfully placed a constellation of 36 broadband satellites into low Earth orbit.

Kineco Kaman is also working on a CFRP crew orbiter module adapter assembly (OMA) to be delivered by December 2023, which is expected to be used for India’s first human space flight mission, Gaganyaan.