<span style="color: #222222;">Today is a special day for India's space mission, as on this day in 1975, India's first unmanned Earth satellite, Aryabhata, was shot into space. With this, India became world's 11th nation and the second developing country after China to orbit a satellite. The mission was X-ray astronomy for the detection and study of X-ray emission from outer space, study of solar neutron and gamma rays emanating from the sun, and study of aeronomy including ionosphere.<br />”<br />”AIR correspondent reports that India has come a long way since the launch of its first satellite, which was built and assembled in sheds in Peenya, Bangalore. The 360-kilogram satellite, Aryabhatta, was launched atop a Soviet rocket, Kosmos-3M, from the Volgograd Spaceport at Kapustin-Yar. After the former Soviet Union and the US, launched their Sputnik and Explorer-1 satellites in 1957 and 1958, the then ISRO Chairman Dr Vikram Sarabhai wanted India to join the satellite race and picked Professor U. R. Rao to lead the mission. Going by the Mantra, ‘if others can do, we can do better’, Prof. Rao led a team of about 300 Indian engineers to develop the satellite within 30 months. The primary ground station for receiving data and commanding the satellite was set up at Sriharikota. A second ground station was built with help of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow for receiving data. To further increase data coverage, the French National Space Agency (CNES) provided the real-time telemetry reception and tracking of the satellite from the station of the French space network.<br />”<br />”Today, India is among the few nations to have sent probes to the moon. Its space organization has four big missions- Gaganyaan, Aditya L1, India’s maiden mission to study the sun; Chandrayaan-3; and the development of a Small Satellite Launch Vehicle, SSLV.</span><br />