Hailing Indian Space Research Organisation for its track record in launches, President Pranab Mukerjee on Monday said the country was looking forward to the success of homegrown GSLV mission.
"It will take about five-and-half days for Chandrayaan-1 to get to the moon," officials said, adding that the probe will be in a 100 km polar orbit around the Moon.
Satellite imagery from the Indian Space Research Organisation shows that heavy and unplanned construction work in Uttarakhand was a leading cause for the devastation which claimed thousands of lives in the hill state. Vicky Nanjappa reports.
India has completed the design of Chandrayaan-2, its next mission to the moon -- this time in collaboration with Russia -- that would have a lander and rover that can collect samples of the lunar soil and analyse them and send back the data.
The ISRO chairman said there was no proposal now to send any Indian astronaut to space through the US.
Stanishev's engagements this week include a visit to the campus of Infosys Technologies Limited.
Although the designed mission life of MOM was six months, the satellite has continued to beam back science data from Mars for the past four years.
two US scientific instruments will be on board India's mission to the Moon 'Chandrayaan-1'.
The Andhra Pradesh government is considering taking the assistance of space agencies Indian Space Research Organisation and National Aeronautics and Space Administration to trace the 17 missing engineering students from Hyderabad who were swept away in Beas river after sudden release of water from a reservoir.
Nervous and anxious for sure but the city-headquartered space agency is cautiously optimistic of "Vikram" module's soft-landing on the Lunar surface planned in the early hours of Saturday.
"Progressively, you can imagine that it becomes that much more difficult, with each passing hour, the available power on the battery gets drained out, and there won't be anything left for it to power and operate", an ISRO official said.
The satellite has reached its final slot and will be fully operational by the month-end.
All spacecraft parameters are normal, the Bengaluru headquartered space agency said after the maneuver on the spacecraft.
The camera was switched on at 10:05 am through a series of commands issued from the spacecraft control centre of ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network here.
There will be two more orbit manoeuvres to make the spacecraft enter into its final orbit passing over the lunar poles at a distance of about 100 km from the Moon's surface.
According to news reports, ground images for this operation were provided by the recently launched Cartosat 2C satellite.
The government has sanctioned seed money of Rs 10 crore to carry out various studies on experiments to be conducted, route of the mission and other related details necessary to scale the new frontier, said ISRO Chairman G Madhavan Nair.
The Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft weighing around 3,290 kg would orbit around the moon and perform the objectives of remote sensing the moon.
ISRO officials said that the Rs 330 crore mission failed minutes after the rocket lifted off at 4.27 pm. Although they would go ahead with the same mission next year, it is still considered to be a setback since ISRO had planned on using the GSLV rocket for its second moon mission.
A mysterious flying object has reportedly been sighted by shepherds over Indian Space Research Organisation's Mahendragiri centre and neighbouring forest areas.
One spacecraft will be Indian Space Research Organisation's own Chandrayaan-2, while the other will be from India's first private moonshot Team Indus which is competing in the Google LunarXPrize challenge.
"Chandrayaan-2 is not the end of story. Our plans on Aditya L1 solar mission, human spaceflight programme are on track. A large number of advance satellite launches are planned in the coming months. SSLV will make its maiden flight sometimes in December or January. Testing of 200 ton semi-cryo engine is expected to begin shortly. Work is on to provide NAVIC signals on mobile phones, which will open the path to develop large number of applications for societal needs," he added.
All spacecraft parameters are normal, the Bengaluru headquartered space agency said after the maneuver.
Cartosat-3 satellite is a third-generation agile advanced satellite having high-resolution imaging capability.
A mix of real-life-inspired and fiction flicks will release this month.
India's advanced multi-band communication satellite GSAT-7, launched from French Guiana by European space consortium Arianespace's Ariane 5 rocket on August 30, has been successfully placed in the geosynchronous orbit with an altitude of about 36,000 km above earth's surface.
As scientists of the Indian Space Research Organisation are decoding the data sent by Chandrayaan-1 from the moon, the space agency is confident that India's first lunar mission would reveal 'unexpected results and things'. "The data have been collected from unexplored area. We are well positioned with these data. We can tell the world that we have found many things, which no explorer has seen so far," Chandrayaan-I Project Director M Annadurai said on Saturday.
The Indian Space Research Organisation will launch four foreign satellites this year as it seeks to make further inroads into the international satellite-building and launch services market in 2009.
