NEW DELHI: Indian Space Research Organisation Chief official S Somanath on Monday, May 29, said that Chandrayaan-3 will be launched in July this year.
In order to demonstrate end-to-end capability in safe landing and wandering on the lunar surface, Chandrayaan-3 is a follow-up mission to Chandrayaan-2. It is configured with Landers and Rovers.
LVM3 will launch it from Sriharikota's Satish Dhawan Space Centre.
The lander and rover configuration will be propelled by the propulsion module up to a 100 kilometre lunar orbit. To analyse the spectral and Polarimetric measurements of Earth from the lunar orbit, the propulsion module will be equipped with the Spectro-polarimetry of Habitable Planet Earth (SHAPE) payload.
In contrast to the previous mission, Chandrayaan-3 will launch the Lander and Rover unit in order to use the orbiter from Chandrayaan-2 for this lunar trip. This time, the stable landing on the moon will be one of ISRO's key goals.
The Lander Module (LM), Propulsion Module (PM), and Rover on Chandrayaan-3 are all indigenous. The Rover, which will perform in-situ chemical analysis of the lunar surface while it is moving, will be released by the Lander after it soft-lands at a predetermined point on the moon. Both the Lander and the Rover are equipped with scientific payloads that will perform surface testing on the moon.
According to the ISRO website, Chandrayaan-3's mission goal is to land on the moon safely and softly, followed by the deployment of a rover to carry out in-situ lunar experiments. A lot of work is being done to do that, according to ISRO Chief S. Somnath, including the development of new instruments, the improvement of algorithms, and the management of failure modes.
The CE-20 cryogenic engine, which will power the Cryogenic Upper Stage of the launch vehicle LVM3 for the Chandrayaan-3 mission, underwent a successful flight acceptance hot test earlier in February, according to ISRO. The ISRO Propulsion Complex in Mahendragiri, Tamil Nadu, served as the venue.
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