New Delhi: India’s next mission to the moon, the Chandrayaan-3, will be launched on 13 July at 2:30 pm.
This is a follow-on mission to Chandrayaan-2 to demonstrate end-to-end capability in safe landing and roving on the lunar surface. It consists of a lander and rover configuration, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has said.
It will be launched by LVM3 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh’s Sriharikota. The propulsion module will carry the lander and rover configuration till 100 km into lunar orbit.
ISRO said the mission’s objectives were “to demonstrate safe and soft landing on the lunar surface, rover roving on the moon and to conduct in-situ scientific experiments”.
Chandrayaan-2 was launched on 22 July, 2019 to map and study the variations in lunar surface composition, as well as the location and abundance of lunar water.
However, the orbiter’s attempt to soft-land a robotic module named Vikram on the moon’s surface failed on 7 September, 2019. A successful landing would have made history for India as it would have been the world’s first lunar landing near its unexplored South Pole.
Chandrayaan-1 was launched on 22 October, 2008 – a major boost to the country’s indigenous space programme – to survey the lunar surface over a two-year period, and to produce a complete map of the chemical composition at the surface and three-dimensional topography.
Also read: Earth’s oxygen creating rusty mineral on Moon, data from Chandrayaan-1 shows