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The Artemis II crew captured this view of the earth setting behind the moon during a lunar flyby, April 6, 2026.
| Photo Credit: NASA
A year after the launch of the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission and the Axiom-4 mission that sent astronaut-candidate Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla to the International Space Station, the U.S. space agency has formally extended an invitation to India to join its ambitious ‘Moon Base’ programme under the Artemis Accords.
At the ninth meeting of the India-U.S. Civil Space Joint Working Group in Bengaluru, NASA invited the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to be part of this programme, through which it is looking to establish a lunar outpost — potentially the first of its kind where astronauts will make the moon’s south pole area their home, where they will live, work, and conduct scientific activities over the next decade, perhaps beyond.
While ISRO has yet to take a call on being part of the Moon Base programme, the invitation extends the growing ties in the space sector between the two countries, especially under the Artemis Accords, to which India signed up in 2023. For ISRO, the invite offers a chance to be part of an international collaboration and gain exposure ahead of its Chandrayaan-4 and crewed moon missions.
Moving on: After months of dilly-dallying, ISRO finally announced its second launch of the year, the GSLV-F17 mission carrying the EOS-05 earth observation satellite. The satellite will be India’s first imaging satellite stationed in the geosynchronous orbit.
