Late on Monday night, in a last-minute revision of schedule, ISRO announced that the launch of India's second lunar mission 'Chandrayaan-2' has been called off due to a technical snag.
NASA said it is looking forward to explore the solar system with its Indian counterpart.
Two de-orbit manoeuvres of Vikram Lander, to bring it further down, have been planned to prepare for its landing in the south polar region of the moon.
The Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft is expected to reach the moon's orbit on August 20 and land on lunar surface on September 7.
Having reached the Red Planet, ISRO can now focus on getting humans in space and secure the resources to do it
The primary goal of HysIS, whose mission life is five years, is to study the earth's surface in visible near infrared and shortwave infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Although Russia, United States and China have achieved a soft landing on the lunar surface, India is aiming at becoming the first one to explore the south pole of the Moon.
Taking its baby steps towards realising India's ambition to send humans into space, Indian Space Research Organisation on Thursday successfully tested the atmospheric re-entry of a crew module after its heaviest launch vehicle GSLV MK III blasted off from Sriharkota.
Scientists also expressed the hope that any technical problem will be sorted out by ISRO, and the mission will be launched successfully.
ISRO Chairman K Sivan described the GSAT-11 as the "richest space asset" for India.
The nine-second de-orbiting or retro-orbiting manoeuvre was executed at 3.42 am using the onboard propulsion system.
The mission life of the 2,250kg GSAT-7A, built by ISRO, is eight years. It will provide communication capability to users in Ku-band over the Indian region.
'It is time we Indians learnt to believe in ourselves, and stopped questioning our own capabilities every time a space launch is not a glorious success,' says M D Riti.
GSAT-18, which aims at providing telecommunications services for the country by strengthening ISRO's current fleet of 14 operational telecom satellites, was launched into a Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit about 32 minutes after the lift-off.
Boosting India's communication services, its latest satellite GSAT-16 was successfully launched on board Arianespace rocket from the spaceport of Kourou in French Guiana in the early hours of Sunday, after a delay of two days due to bad weather.
Other than the Cartosat-2 series satellite, the PSLV is carrying 29 nano satellites from 14 countries - Austria, Belgium, Chile, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, the United Kingdom and the United States of America besides a nano satellite from India.
We sorted through countless photographs taken around the world to come up with the top photos of 2019. Together these images tell the story of the year -- capturing moments of hope and heartbreak, triumph and tragedy.
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