The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft from ISRO has arrived at the Sriharikota launch site.
If the Chandrayaan-3 mission succeeds, India will become the fourth nation to successfully complete a soft landing on the Moon.
Prior to its scheduled July launch, the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has reportedly arrived at Sriharikota’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre. The unsuccessful Chandrayaan-2 mission was followed by the successful Chandrayaan-3 mission.
The space agency’s Launch Vehicle Mark-III (LVM3) vehicle will be used to launch the Chandrayaan-3 mission, which consists of a lander and a rover. According to ISRO, the lander and rover configuration will be carried by the launch system’s propulsion module until it reaches a 100-kilometer lunar orbit. The SHAPE (Spectro-polarimetry of Habitable Planet Earth) instrument, which will analyse the spectral and Polarimetric measurements of Earth from lunar orbit, will also be carried by the propulsion module.
According to M. Sankaran, director of the U.R. Rao Satellite Centre on Thursday, “Chandrayaan-3 has already reached the launch port, preparation is going on there at Sriharikota, and we do expect that sometime in July the launch can take place.” At the facility in Bengaluru, the payload for the Chandrayaan-3 mission was put together.
The Chandrayaan-3 mission’s main goal is to demonstrate a soft landing on the lunar surface. Only the former Soviet Union, the United States, and China have been able to make a soft landing on the moon thus far. The Chandrayaan-2 mission by ISRO tried a soft landing of this kind, but it failed when the Vikram lander lost contact with mission control.
There have also been missions led by the commercial sector that attempted a smooth landing. On April 11, 2019, the Israeli spacecraft Beresheet crashed into the Moon seconds before it was supposed to touch down. As the first privately funded lunar landing, it would have made history if it had been successful.
More recently, on April 25, 2023, the Japanese space technology company Ispace’s Hakuto lander also failed to make a soft landing. The spaceship left the Earth and travelled 1.6 million kilometres in a tortuous, four-month-long journey.
“Every component of the mission has been examined, especially in light of Chandrayaan 2’s experience, and all appropriate safety measures have been adopted. Both optimism and trepidation are present at ISRO, according to Sankaran, who spoke with News18.
Article courtesy @ Indianexpress
