Space station plan on track, says ISRO’s Veeramuthuvel

UDHAGAMANDALAM: India’s ambitious plans to have its space station by 2035 and have an Indian astronaut on the moon by 2040 are progressing on track, Project Director of ISRO’s Chandrayaan-3 mission, P Veeramuthuvel said on Saturday.

“Prime Minister Narendra Modi and ISRO chairman have already said that by 2040 we should have an Indian astronaut on the moon and also to have our space station by 2035. These are very ambitious plans that ISRO has taken up and we are working towards that,” he said.

On ISRO’s success in bringing back the Propulsion Module (PM) of the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft to Earth’s orbit, Veeramuthuvel said, “As far as Chandrayaan-3 is concerned, the lander and rover mission completed one lunar day.

“We completed the hop-on experiment wherein we used the same engine where we landed and again we operated the payload for one earth day,” the ISRO scientist added.

The propulsion module which was supposed to orbit around the moon met all the mission objectives successfully.

“We brought the propulsion module back to earth’s orbit because we got some propellent available in the propulsion module and demonstrated (our capability) by successfully bringing it from moon’s orbit to earth’s orbit,” he said.