When Will India’s Lunar Spacecraft ‘Chandrayaan-3’ Land On The Moon?
India’s space agency, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), is set to launch Chandrayaan-3, its ambitious lunar mission, on June 14.
The spacecraft will be launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. The target launch time is 2:35 pm on June 14. The launch vehicle, Mark-III (LVM-III), will carry the spacecraft to the Moon.
Chandrayaan-2, launched in 2019, took nearly 48 days to reach the Moon. Unlike the direct approach of the Apollo missions, Chandrayaan-2 will gradually raise its orbit and reach the Moon.
Chandrayaan-2 employed a series of complex orbital maneuvers slowly entered in the Moon orbit. Chandrayaan-3 will follow a similar approach and is expected to reach the Moon by the end of August if launched on July 14.
Once Chandrayaan-3 enters the Moon’s gravitational field, it will undergo a series of orbit-reducing maneuvers to lower its altitude and enter a circular orbit around the Moon.
This process, known as Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI), involves precise engine firings. Following LOI, the mission will detach from the Propulsion Module, and the lander-rover combination will descend on the Moon’s surface for a soft landing.
This mission Chandrayaan-3 comes four years after the unsuccessful Chandrayaan-2 mission. In 2019, India launched Chandrayaan-2, which was a more ambitious mission that included a lander and rover. The lander successfully touched down on the Moon, but the rover failed to deploy.
But the Chandrayaan-3 is fully prepared to soft-land on the Moon’s surface and is equipped with a lander and rover.
India is the first and only country in the world, which successfully landed its unmanned spacecraft (Chandrayaan-1) on Moon in the very first attempt. No country has seized that till date.
ISRO’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft successfully landed on the Moon on November 8, 2008, in its very first attempt.
This was a major achievement for the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), and it showed that India was capable of competing with the world’s leading space programs.
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The ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) is one of the fastest-growing space organizations in the world, and it is clear that India is a major player in the global space world.