Confident about Chandrayaan-3 launching in July, says ISRO chairman
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Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman S Somnath said that he is confident that the third edition of India's lunar mission - Chandrayaan-3 - will be launched in July 2023. It is aimed at demonstrating end-to-end capability in safe landing and roving on the surface of the Moon.
"The lesson is very simple. Learn from the past, and do what is possible with your capacity. Failures may happen. There are a thousand reasons for a rocket to fail. Even today, this mission could have failed. But we have to do what needs to be done," he told ANI.
The mission consists of an indigenous lander module, a propulsion module, and a rover with the objective of developing and demonstrating new technologies needed for interplanetary missions. The goals of Chandrayaan-3 are to demonstrate a safe and soft landing on the lunar Surface; to demonstrate Rover roving on the moon and to conduct in-situ scientific experiments.
It will be launched from the SDSC SHAR centre in Sriharikota by the LVM3 rocket. The propulsion module will carry the lander and rover to a 100 km lunar orbit, said ISRO.
The propulsion module carries the Spectro-polarimetry of Habitable Planet Earth (SHAPE) payload which will study the spectral and Polari metric measurements of Earth from the lunar orbit. The Lander can soft land at a specific site on the Moon and deploy the Rover which will do chemical analysis of the lunar surface.
The Chandrayaan is India's lunar space exploration programme. The first lunar probe of ISRO, Chandrayaan-1, found water on the moon and the second, Chandrayaan-2, was successfully inserted into orbit but crash landed minutes later.