Two days after Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft was launched into elliptical Earth orbit, it performed the first earth-bound orbit raising manoeuvre successfully on Wednesday, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) wrote on Twitter. The manoeuvre was carried out at 2.52 pm using the on-board propulsion system for a firing duration of 57 seconds, ISRO said, adding that the new orbit will be 230 X 45163 km. According to ISRO, the second orbit raising manoeuvre is scheduled in the early hours of Friday at about 1 am. On Monday, Chandrayaan-2 mission lifted off from the Sriharikota launch range at its appointed time of 0243 pm. The mission would see the lander and rover modules of the spacecraft make a soft-landing on the moon’s surface 48 days from now, on September 7. Both of them will be ‘alive’ there for 14 days, during which they will carry out various experiments and collect data. Among several countries, the US space agency NASA congratulated ISRO on the launch of Chandrayaan-2 via Twitter. “Congrats to ISRO on the launch of Chandrayaan 2, a mission to study the Moon. We’re proud to support your mission comms using our Deep Space Network and look forward to what you learn about the lunar South pole where we will send astronauts on our Artemis mission in a few years,” tweeted the official NASA account.
