India’s ambitious plan to have its own space station by 2035 and land Indian astronauts on the moon by 2040 is on track, ISRO’s Chandrayaan-3 mission project director P Veeramuthuvel said on Saturday.

“Prime Minister Narendra Modi and ISRO Chairman have said that we should have Indian astronauts on the moon by 2040 and have our space station by 2035. ISRO has taken up these very ambitious plans, We are working hard to achieve this,” he told PTI here.

On ISRO’s success in bringing the propulsion module (PM) of the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft back to Earth orbit, Veeramuthuvel said, “In the case of Chandrayaan-3, the lander and rover missions were successfully completed within one day on the lunar calendar.

“We successfully completed the hop-on experiment in which we used the same engines used for landing and operated the payload again for one Earth day,” the ISRO scientist added.

The propulsion module, originally scheduled to orbit the moon, successfully achieved all mission objectives.

“We brought the propulsion module back to Earth orbit because we got some usable propellant in the propulsion module and demonstrated (our capabilities) by successfully bringing it back from lunar orbit to Earth orbit,” he said.

(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from associated news agency – PTI)