Coming Friday would be an important day for India as it will commence its third mission to the moon. The mission will take off at 2:35 PM IST. It aims to achieve what the earlier mission could not hit, i.e., the target to land softly on the moon.
A successful landing on the moon will make the country the fourth nation in the world to land on the lunar surface smoothly, after the United States, Russia, and China.
Mission to the Moon
LVM3 M4/Chandrayaan-3 Mission:
— ISRO (@isro) July 12, 2023
Mission Readiness Review is completed.
The board has authorised the launch.
The countdown begins tomorrow.
The launch can be viewed LIVE onhttps://t.co/5wOj8aimkHhttps://t.co/zugXQAY0c0https://t.co/u5b07tA9e5
DD National
from 14:00 Hrs. IST…
First, the spacecraft is going to launch into an orbit around the Earth at an altitude of exactly 179 km. The spacecraft is going to slowly increase its orbit in a series of manoeuvres to get ahead of the gravity of the Earth and move toward the lunar surface. once this happens, a different series of manoeuvres are going to decrease the orbit of the spacecraft to a 100 x 100 km circular one. The lander which holds the rover inside is going to separate from the propulsion module and begin its powered descent.
How is it different from the previous mission?
S Somnath, ISRO's chairperson recently stated that the changes to the new mission have been actually "failure-based." He stated, “Instead of a success-based design in Chandrayaan-2, we are doing a failure-based design in Chandrayaan-3 —we are looking at what can go wrong and how to deal with it.”
At the time of Chandrayaan-2, the rover and the lander had crashed on the lunar surface, rather than landing softly. The chairperson explained that the main issue behind such a landing was that the five engines on the lander gave a slightly greater thrust than expected. To determine the site of the landing, the lander had to click images by remaining stable during the period. That is when the errors took place.
The current mission however is designed after considering all these errors.
The very first change that deserves attention is that the landing area has been expanded. Rather than attempting to reach a set 500mx500m patch for landing as done by the previous Chandrayaan-2, the present mission has been instructed to make a safe landing anywhere in an area of 4kmx2.4km.
Another aspect that comes into focus is the landing site. Chandrayaan 2 landed on the moon's near side, while Chandrayaan 3 is created to land on the moon's South Pole. The South Pole is a very important region for lunar exploration, as it is thought to be rich in water ice.
Finally, Chandrayaan 3 will be a more autonomous mission than Chandrayaan 2. The lander and rover on Chandrayaan 3 will be able to operate more independently, as there will be no human intervention possible once they land on the moon.
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