Since the launch of the Chandrayaan-3 mission on July 14, the ground stations of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) have been supporting Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to monitor the spacecraft’s health.
“Since the launch of Chandrayaan-3, ESA has been supporting the mission by utilising two of the ground stations in the ESTRACK network to track the satellite in its orbit, receive telemetry from the spacecraft and forward it to the Mission Operations Centre in Bengaluru, and forward commands sent from Bengaluru to the flying satellite,” Ramesh Chellathurai, ground operations engineer at ESOC Darmstadt, Germany told The Hindu.
The ESA’s 15-metre antenna in Kourou, French Guiana, and the 32-metre antenna belonging to Goonhilly Earth Station, U.K., were selected for the support, based on their technical capabilities as well as their periods of geometric visibility to the satellite.
