With the initial euphoria of the success of India’s moon mission settling down, time has come to reflect on what exactly it gave and what it will continue to give to India. First and foremost, it proved that India is amongst the best as far as the business of space is concerned. With this mission it entered an exclusive club of nations that can send missions to deep space, over a distance of more than a lakh kilometres. The mission’s success has not only forced the entire world to take notice of India’s achievements in the field but also demonstrated the fact that there are cost-effective ways even to reach the moon.

After Chandrayaan-1, India’s first moon satellite was successfully launched into an initial elliptical orbit around the earth by PSLV-C11 on October 22, 2008, doubts were expressed in certain quarters that how successful India could be in actually reaching towards the moon. Some Chinese websites, for example, insisted that India was misleading the world about its achievements and the mission was actually unlikely to succeed. (There was no reaction from ISRO.) But then, till November 14, every day was crucial for the scientists working at ISRO, for various reasons. Their first major task was to raise the satellite’s orbit from an initial height of approximately 22,000 km to the phenomenal distance of more than 3,83,000 km. Subsequently, they were to play the “game of gravity”: which they succeeded at, as the spacecraft broke away from the earth’s gravitational field entered the moon’s gravity instead. On that day, November 14, a Moon Impact Probe (MIP), with the

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