Great morale booster, says DRDO chief about PM Modi's hug to ISRO chairman

Defence Research and Development Orgsation (DRDO) chairman G Satheesh Reddy on Sunday hailed Prime Minister Narendra Modi for consoling and hugging ISRO chief K Sivan after the later broke down following Chandrayaan-2's Vikram Lander going offline.

"It is a great gesture by the Prime Minister. It is a great morale booster for scientists who saw last mile glitch in the mission," Satheesh told here.

He said: "I think the ISRO scientists again started working on the mission after that gesture. They started looking for what actually happened and that is how they could locate the rover also."

Prime Minister Modi was present at the ISRO headquarters in Bengaluru when Vikram Lander stopped sending signals to its ground station in the wee hours of Saturday.

Before formally announcing the sad development, Sivan walked up to Modi to inform him that the ground station had lost contact with the Lander when it was 2.1-km from the lunar surface.

The DRDO chief slammed Pakistan's Federal Minister Fawad Ahmed Chaudhry for trying to ridicule India's second lunar mission, saying that "they cannot understand the complexity" of the mission.

"Chandrayaan-2 is a very complex mission. This type of complex mission can be appreciated by those people who have also taken up such missions. The people who haven't done anything of this class, I don't think they can appreciate and probably they cannot understand the complexity of this mission," Ahmed had said.

Chandrayaan-2, India's second Moon mission, was launched from Sriharikota on July 22. It revolved around the Earth's orbit for nearly 23 days before starting its journey towards the moon on August 14.

( With inputs from ANI )