Chandrayaan-3 will be launched from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota.
The Indian Space Research Organisation is planning to launch the lunar mission Chandrayaan-3 in mid of July, the space agency’s Chairman S. Somnath said on Thursday. Chandrayaan-3 is a follow-up mission to Chandrayaan-2, which encountered issues during its landing attempt in 2019.
“Chandrayaan-3 is nearing launch. We have already moved the satellite from U. R. Rao Satellite Centre (Bengaluru) to the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (Sriharikota). The rocket is LVM-3. The integration of the rocket is currently going on. The integration will happen by this month end and the rocket will be fully ready, and we will be assembling the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft to the rocket possibly by the beginning of July. The launch is in the middle of July,” Somnath told reporters at the SMOPS-2023 International Conference on Spacecraft Mission Operations (Source: The Indian Express).
The ISRO Chairman added that Chandrayaan-3 is going on the same path as its predecessor Chandrayaan-2 and the landing site is also going to be the same. As previously mentioned, Chandrayaan-3 is a follow-on mission to Chandrayaan-2 and the lunar mission aims to demonstrate end-to-end capability in safe landing and roving on the Moon’s surface. It consists of Lander and Rover configuration and will be launched by LVM3 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. The purpose of Chandrayaan-3 is to land a rover on the lunar surface successfully and conduct scientific experiments.
With Chandrayaan-3, ISRO is gearing up to repeat a mission like Chandrayaan-2, which was launched on July 22, 2019. India’s second lunar mission Chandrayaan-2 comprised an orbiter, a lander called Vikram, and a rover called Pragyan. The primary objective of Chandrayaan-2 was to attempt a soft landing on the lunar south pole and deploy the rover to conduct scientific experiments.
India then hoped to become the fourth country, just after the U.S., Russia, and China, to make a successful landing on the moon with its Vikram lander. However, during the landing phase, communication with the lander was lost, and it crash-landed on the Moon’s surface. Days after the crash, a NASA satellite released an image of the site of the spacecraft’s impact and associated debris field.
Elsewhere, when asked about India’s first test flight of the ‘abort mission’ for the country’s first human spaceflight Gaganyaan, ISRO’s Somnath said that the first abort mission on the special vehicle test could slip to August. This will be followed by another test flight later this year and another unmanned mission possibly by the beginning of 2024. “We do not want to rush, the primary objective of the human space mission is ‘sure shot safe mission’. We have redefined the mission in such a way that we will achieve success in the very first attempt,” Somnath said. (Source: The Hindu)
About Gaganyaan, India’s first human space-flight mission was scheduled to launch last year when India celebrated its 75th independence anniversary but got delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic also took a toll on the training of astronauts in Russia and India. However, if everything goes well now, Indian astronauts could fly into orbit by the end of 2024 after ISRO successfully carries out abort missions and uncrewed test flights.
