Iran Says Pursuing Plans To Send Astronauts Into Space
Iranian Communication and IT Minister Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi announced that his country plans to send astronauts into space in cooperation with foreign states.
“We should send astronauts into space in cooperation with other countries and this type of thinking helps the space industry,” Azari Jahromi said, addressing a ceremony to celebrate the World Space Week in Tehran on Saturday.
He added that in addition to pursuing plans to send man into space, Iran will orbit a satellite which can take images with the resolution of 1 meter in the next two years.
Addressing the same ceremony earlier today, Head of the Iranian Space Agency (ISA) Morteza Barari announced that his country would launch 3 cube satellites into the orbit in the near future.
“This year (the Iranian year which started on March 21), three satellites will be ready in the next three months. 2 launchers will be prepared in the next few months and we want to launch three cubesats too in addition to the launcher,” Barari said.
“This year, we have three satellites and it was decided that two samples of Zafar satellite be ready and they (the scientists) are preparing the Pars 1 satellite and a remote sensing satellite with the precision of 15 meters,” he added.
Barari underlined that Nahid 1 satellite has been built and will be sent into the 250-km orbit, noting that manufacturing two new satellites will be on Iran’s agenda next year.
Iran is one of the 9 states building satellites beside the US, Russia, Europe and Canada.
Iran in February 2017 unveiled two new home-made satellites of Nahid 1 and Amir Kabir as well as a space tug built for the first time in the country.
The three space crafts were unveiled in a ceremony participated by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in Tehran on the occasion of the Space Technology Day in Iran.
Nahid 1 is a telecommunication satellite built in the Iranian Space Research Center.
Payam-e Amir Kabir has been designed and built in Amir Kabir University of Technology and is capable of taking images with a precision better than 40 meters.
Meantime, Saman 1 space tug which has been manufactured for the first time in the country is used to transfer the satellites from Low Earth orbit (LEO) to higher-energy orbits.
Earlier this year, Scimago Institutions Rankings, a science evaluation source to assess worldwide universities and research-focused institutions, reported that Iran ranked first in the Middle-East in the development of aerospace engineering in 2018.
Aerospace engineering is the primary field of engineering concerned with the development of aircraft and spacecraft. It has two major and overlapping branches of aeronautical engineering and astronautical engineering.
Based on the report, Iran stood atop the Middle-Eastern states in aerospace engineering with 486 documents, 441 citable documents and 516 citations in international papers.
The report added that Iran has outpaced Turkey, Israel (Occupied Palestine), Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, the UAE and Jordan in aerospace engineering in the Middle-East in 2018.
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