#ISROsRemarkableSpaceEngineering 🌘🇮🇳🛸

#ISRO ⚡️🫶, one of India’s priceless jewels that leads the third most advanced #deepspace program in the world and is carrying forward ancient Bharat’s rigorous mathematical and astrophysics legacy, quietly and successfully, manoeuvred the #PropulsionModule (PM) of the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft back into the Earth's orbit.

On 23rd August 2023, ISRO’s #Chandrayaan3 reached the historical milestone of launching Vikram lander safely down on the unpredictable and super dusty surface of the Moon. India became the fourth country to achieve a soft landing on the Moon. But ISRO’s this space explorative experiments did not stop here. On Monday, ISRO announced that it has successfully returned the propulsion module used by the spacecraft into a high orbit around Earth. This experimental phase of the mission tested key capabilities needed for future lunar missions, including the potential for returning lunar rocks to Earth.

The propulsion module delivered the Vikram 3 lander into a low-lunar orbit, 100 km above the surface of the Moon. And then it moved to an orbit around the Moon at an altitude of 150 km, to support a science experiment of observing Mom Earth, known as SHAPE. After a month, when ISRO engineers found that the spacecraft still had a reserve of more than 100 kg of propellant, they decided to do additional maneuvers -to demonstrate the capability of the spacecraft to return to Earth orbit.

"It was decided to use the available fuel in the PM to derive additional information for future lunar missions and demonstrate the mission operation strategies for a sample return mission” - On October 9, the propulsion module raised its lunar orbit from 150 km to 5,112 km, and four days later it burned its engine again to begin exiting the lunar orbit. In its new orbit around Earth, the propulsion module reached its first perigee on November 22, coming to within 154,000 km of the planet's surface.