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ISRO chairman S Somanath on Tuesday said that the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft is set to make a soft landing on the Moon on August 23.
Somanath made the comments while speaking during a talk on Chandrayaan-3 hosted by the non-profit organisation Disha Bharat. “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 according to news agency PTI.
The Chandrayaan-3 mission took aff atop an LVM-3 rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota at 2.35 PM IST on July 14, 2023. After takeoff and separation from the launch module, the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft executed multiple manoeuvres climbing to a higher Earth orbit each time before finally injecting itself into a “translunar” orbit on August 5.
Then, on Sunday, August 6, the spacecraft entered a lunar orbit. It first achieved an orbit where it was 164 kilometres from the Moon at its closest and 18,074 kilometres from the Moon at its farthest. It then completed a manoevure which then took it to a 170 by 4313 kilometre orbit. The mission’s next orbit manoevure should happen between 1 PM and 2 PM IST today. This will be followed by two more manoeuvres on August 14 and August 15 till it reaches its final 100 kilometre by 100 kilometre orbit.
After it reaches that final orbit, the spacecraft will start a deboost process where the craft will slow down before the lander module will separate to land 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.
Chandrayaan-3 will land India in the history pages as just the fourth country in the world to manage a soft-landing on the Moon—a feat that it attempted unsuccessfully with the Chandrayaan-2 mission. The only other countries that have achieved the same so far are the United States, the erstwhile Soviet Union and China. Apart from Chandrayaan-2, privately-led attempts from Israel and Japan have also crashed on the Moon.
