ISRO chief confident Chandrayaan-3 will land even if ‘ all sensors fail, nothing works’
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The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft is scheduled to make a soft landing on the Moon on August 23, according to ISRO Chairman S Somanath's statement on Tuesday.
During a discussion about Chandrayaan-3 which was organised by the nonprofit Disha Bharat, Somanath made the comments.
“If everything fails, if all the sensors fail, nothing works, still it (Vikram) will make a landing. That’s how it has been designed — provided that the propulsion system works well. We have also made sure that if two of the engines (in Vikram) don’t work this time also, it will still be able to land,” said the chairman during the event, Indian Express reported.
On July 14, 2023, at 2.35 PM IST, the Chandrayaan-3 mission launched aboard an LVM-3 rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft performed several manoeuvres after liftoff and separation from the launch module, each time travelling to a higher Earth orbit, before finally placing itself into a "translunar" orbit on August 5.
The spacecraft subsequently entered a lunar orbit on Sunday, August 6. When it initially got into orbit, it was 164 kilometres from the Moon at its closest point and 18,074 kilometres away at its farthest point. It subsequently finished a manoeuvre that brought it into an orbit of 170 by 4313 km. The next orbit manoeuvre for the mission is scheduled for today between 1 and 2 PM IST. After this, it will perform two additional moves on August 14 and 15 to get it to its final 100 by 100 km orbit.
The spacecraft will begin a deboost procedure once it reaches that final orbit, slowing down before the lander module separates to touch down on the lunar surface on August 23.
“We have also made sure that if two of the engines don’t work this time also, it will still be able to land. So the whole design has been made to make sure that it should be able to handle many failures, provided the algorithms work properly,” said the chairman during the same event, speaking about the Vikram lander.
India will go down in history as the fourth nation in the world to successfully make a soft landing on the moon thanks to Chandrayaan-3, a feat it attempted failed with Chandrayaan-2. Only the United States, the former Soviet Union, and China have so far accomplished the same feat. Along with Chandrayaan-2, moon landing missions from Israel and Japan that were privately sponsored have also failed.
