MELBOURNE, 11 July 2023: India’s Moon mission, the Chandrayaan-3, is set for launch on Friday, July 14, and is intended to land a rover in the southern hemisphere of the Moon’s surface. If successful, India will become only the fifth country after Russia, China, the US, and France to make a controlled lunar landing.
Chandrayaan-3 is set to be launched from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, using the advanced Launch Vehicle Mark-III (LVM3). It is a follow-on mission to the second lunar exploration mission, Chandrayaan-2 that was launched on 22 July, 2019, to explore the far side of the moon.
Movement of the launch vehicle to the launch pad. pic.twitter.com/Tu973C6IjC
— ISRO (@isro) July 7, 2023
Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chief S Somanath said the space agency had designed the Chandrayaan-3 with a failure-based approach.
The Chandrayaan-2 was a partially unsuccessful mission when communication between the lander rover, Vikram, and Earth’s mission control station was lost after the rover crashed.
Previously, Chandrayaan-2’s rover crash-landed on the Moon’s surface due to some technical glitchs.
However, the orbiter managed to float above the Moon and helped achieve path-breaking new discoveries like detecting the presence of water molecules on the moon.
“In nutshell if you tell what the problem in Chandrayaan-2 was, it is simple to say that the ability to handle parameter variation or dispersion was very limited.
So, what we did this time was simply expand it further. Look at what are the things that can go wrong…” he explained.
The Launch Vehicle Mark-III will launch the Chandrayaan-3.
A soft-landing on the lunar surface is expected on 23 or 24 August. The Chandrayaan-3 mission has scientific instruments to study the thermo-physical properties of the lunar seismicity, regolith, surface plasma environment, and elemental composition.
The three main objectives of Chandrayaan-3 are to land safely on the surface, to demonstrate rover operations and to perform scientific experiments on site, according to the official website. It is expected to land around Aug. 23 or Aug. 24, the Times of India wrote in a separate article.
Text sources- ISRO, ANI, Sputnik India etc.
Photos- @isro
