New Delhi: After two years of hard work, a team of scientists from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has completed developing hydrogen fuel cells to power an automobile bus by leveraging their know-how of the home grown cryogenic technology for rockets.

"That is not exactly cryogenic technology. It is liquid hydrogen handling and that's where we have some expertise. So, we have finalized the design", ISRO Chairman G. Madhavan Nair explained.

ISRO's honorary adviser V. Gnana Gandhi informed that a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between ISRO and Tata Motors in 2006 to design and develop an automobile bus using hydrogen as a fuel through the fuel cell route.

The team along with the ISRO Chairman is hopeful that the project will culminate by next year.

"The Tatas are taking the responsibility for its locomotive part and handling system. The first proto-model has been assembled. The results are good. May be next year, it should be on the road", Nair added.

Focusing on the improvement of the project, Gandhi said, "Technical specifications for all the elements and general specifications for the bus, along with the preliminary and detailed design review for all components and the subsystems has been completed".

An official report from ISRO said that it had tied up with Tata Motors as it did not have an expertise in automobile and Tata Motors had shown its reliability in the field in the last couple of years.