New Delhi: President Draupadi Murmu on Friday said Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) was working towards making India’s first space station. She made this announcement while delivering her address at an event held to celebrate India’s maiden National Space Day at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi.
India is celebrating its maiden National Space Day today (August 23) to commemorate the successful landing of the Vikram Lander from the Chandrayaan-3 mission on the lunar surface. This was a historic achievement that made India the fourth country to land a rover on the Moon. In fact, India is the first nation to do so in the southern polar region.
Greetings to everyone on the first National Space Day. We recall with great pride our nation’s achievements in the space sector. It is also a day to laud the contributions of our space scientists. Our Government has taken a series of futuristic decisions relating to this sector… pic.twitter.com/E7QcNDSm4u
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) August 23, 2024
The theme for this year’s National Space Day is “Touching Lives while Touching the Moon: India’s Space Saga.” On this occasion, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, conveyed his greetings on X (formerly Twitter). He wrote: “Greetings to everyone on the first National Space Day. We recall with great pride our nation’s achievements in the space sector. It is also a day to laud the contributions of our space scientists. Our Government has taken a series of futuristic decisions relating to this sector and we will do even more in the times to come.”
The Chandrayaan-3 mission was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh and it successfully achieved a soft landing of the Vikram Lander on August 23, 2023.
During the celebration of National Space Day event at Bharat Mandapam, Union Minister of State, Department of Space, Jitendra Singh said, “A year ago, on August 23, 2023, our Chandrayaan-III became the first space mission to land on the south side of the Moon…The world never expected that we would be able to achieve this feat because our space journey is only 55 years long…Today, ISRO within half a century became the first to have landed on the south side of the Moon, before anyone else…”
Ahead of the celebrations, ISRO had also released several images of the moon’s surface captured by Vikram Lander on social media.
#ISRO is set to reveal the thousands of images captured by the Vikram Lander and Pragyan Rover on #Chandrayaan3‘s landing anniversary, i.e. tomorrow!! 📸 🌖
Here’s a sneak peek at some of those images:
[1/3] Images taken by Pragyan’s NavCam: 👇
(Read alt text for details) pic.twitter.com/8wlbaLwzSX— ISRO Spaceflight (@ISROSpaceflight) August 22, 2024
“Last year we successfully launched the Chandrayaan-3 mission. We never imagined the impact that is going to create out of this accomplishment. And it is when the Prime Minister of India visited us in the control centre after a few days, and he declared 23rd August as National Space Day and declared the landing site i.e. Chandrayaan-3 as Shiva Shakti point…” said ISRO Chairman, S Somanath.
[2/3] Images taken by the Lander Imager (LI) and Rover Imager (RI) on Vikram.
The first 3 images are from LI, and the last one is from RI. pic.twitter.com/BrjKFZwemf
— ISRO Spaceflight (@ISROSpaceflight) August 22, 2024
On Thursday, President Droupadi Murmu had presented the Vigyan Team Award to Team Chandrayaan-3 in the field of Space Science and Technology.
