On moonlit nights between now and the final days of August, curious Indians will turn their gazes to the sky, surveying it in playful attempts to pick out a spacecraft — a mere man-made speck in the vast, forbidding reaches of space — as it resolutely makes its way to the Earth’s closest neighbour and lone companion.
Predictably, India’s third lunar mission, which got off to a thrilling start from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota, on Friday afternoon, has captured the imagination of the public as did the two earlier ones. The Chandrayaan-3 mission, launched aboard the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) hefty Launch Vehicle Mark-3 (LVM3), is a follow-up mission to Chandrayaan-2, which it resembles in many ways. Once the spacecraft is safely in orbit around the moon in late August, ISRO will attempt to soft-land the Lander and deploy the six-wheeled, box-shaped Rover, which it failed to do with the Chandrayaan-2 mission in 2019. ‘Vikram’, the Chandrayaan-2 lander, had crashed on the lunar surface, breaking off communication much to the bitter disappointment of the space agency.
This time, the mission is better designed to withstand the challenges of a robotic moon landing near the south pole, according to S. Somanath, Chairman, ISRO. The Propulsion Module will carry the Lander-Rover configuration to a 100-km circular polar orbit around the moon. All three, the Propulsion Module, the Lander and Rover, carry scientific payloads designed to further our knowledge of the earth’s lone natural satellite, a rocky orb that has variously mystified, enchanted and inspired countless generations of humans through the slow-moving centuries.
