According to ISRO head, Chandrayaan-3 will land even if “everything fails, all sensors fail, and nothing works.”
Speaking at a ceremony on Tuesday, ISRO Chairman S Somanath stated that the Chandrayaan-3 mission will achieve a smooth landing even if two engines and all of the sensors on the Vikram lander stop working.
The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft is scheduled to make a soft landing on the Moon on August 23, according to ISRO Chairman S. Somnath’s statement on Tuesday.
During a discussion about Chandrayaan-3 that was organised by the nonprofit Disha Bharat, Somanath made the remarks. “Even if everything goes wrong, if all the sensors stop working, nothing works, Vikram will still land. It has been built in that way, assuming the propulsion system functions well. According to news agency PTI, the chairman remarked during the ceremony, “We have also ensured that if two of the engines (in Vikram) don’t function this time also, it will still be able to land.
On July 14, 2023, at 2.35 PM IST, the Chandrayaan-3 mission launched aboard an LVM-3 rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft performed several manoeuvres after liftoff and separation from the launch module, each time travelling to a higher Earth orbit, before finally putting itself into a “translunar” orbit on August 5.
The spacecraft subsequently entered a lunar orbit on Sunday, August 6. When it initially got into orbit, it was 164 kilometres from the Moon at its closest point and 18,074 kilometres away at its farthest point. It subsequently finished a manoeuvre that brought it into an orbit of 170 by 4313 km. The next orbit manoeuvre for the mission is scheduled for today between 1 and 2 PM IST. After this, it will perform two additional moves on August 14 and 15 to get it to its final 100 by 100 km orbit.
The spacecraft will begin a deboost procedure once it reaches that final orbit, slowing down before the lander module separates to touch down on the lunar surface in August.
We have also ensured that it will be able to land even if two of the engines fail this time as well. Therefore, the entire architecture of the Vikram lander has been created to ensure that it should be able to tolerate numerous failures, assuming that the algorithms are effective, added the chairman at the same event.
India will go down in history as the fourth nation in the world to successfully make a soft landing on the moon thanks to Chandrayaan-3, a feat it attempted failed with Chandrayaan-2. Only the United States, the former Soviet Union, and China have so far accomplished the same feat. In addition to Chandrayaan-2, independently-led initiatives from Israel and Japan have also failed to land on.
