Today, India is considered a leader in Earth observation and is striving to provide weather monitoring, communication and navigation capabilities. When Isro devised its first planetary exploration mission—Chandrayaan-1—it set a new boundary of 384,000km, i.e. a 10-fold increase in distance from the previously achieved distance of 36,000km needed for geostationary functionality of communication satellite missions. Isro successfully put the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft in lunar orbit at a distance of 384,000km and achieved the 100km circular orbit around the moon. The success of the mission—in terms of launch, spacecraft control and manoeuvring, payloads operation and reception of volumes of good quality data—has strengthened Isro’s confidence in taking up tasks of high complexities. Read More