India: The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has announced that Chandrayaan-3 has entered the moon’s orbit after three weeks of its launch.
The ISRO confirmed that it had been “successfully inserted into the lunar orbit.” According to the organisation, if everything goes well, it will safely touch down near the moon’s little-explored south pole between August 23rd and 24th, 2023.
The last moon mission, Chandrayan-2 of ISRO, ended in failure in the last phase. Chandrayaan-3 is developed by the ISRO, and it also includes a lander module named Vikram and a rover named Pragyan. The cost of the mission is over $74.6 million.
It is a major milestone for the country, which has run its ambitious aerospace programme on a comparatively low budget, as per the statement. Only Russia, the United States, and China have previously achieved a soft landing on the lunar surface.
The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft took significantly longer to reach the moon’s orbit compared to the manned Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, which arrived in a matter of days.
If the landing is successful, the rover will roll off Vikram and explore the nearby lunar area, capturing images to be sent back to Earth for analysis. ISRO chief Mr. S. Somanath has said his engineers carefully studied the data from the last failed mission and tried their best to fix the glitches. The ISRO’s Gaganyaan, Sanskrit for sky craft, programme is to launch a three-day manned mission into Earth’s orbit by 2024.
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