“Young woman” named Vyom Mitra will ride to space in the first test flight of the human space mission, Gaganyaan. The ISRO unveiled its first ‘woman’ astronaut to an international gathering here on Wednesday. Seated at a desk in a uniform and sporting her name on a custom-made ISRO identity badge, Vyom Mitra created a sensation as she introduced herself to ISRO Chairman K. Sivan and Principal Scientific Adviser K. Vijay Raghavan at the symposium on human space flight. Two trial flights without crew will take place with a humanoid — the first around December 2020 and the second around July 2021. Vyom Mitra is the result of a year-long toil of the ISRO Inertial Systems Unit, Thiruvananthapuram. The ISRO will send the human-resemblingmodel in a space capsule around the end of 2020 or early 2021 to study how she and later real astronauts respond to living outside earth in controlled zero-gravity conditions. She can detect and give out warnings if environmental changes within the cabin get uncomfortable to astronauts and change the air condition.
