The narrator
If successful, India will join only three other countries to have successfully landed a space flight on the moon.
The Indian space agency has planned to launch its Chandrayaan-3 moon mission from an island in the southeast of India. Sriharikotaat the Satish Dhawan Space Center on July 14 at 2:35pm local time (09:05 GMT).
Built on a budget of $75m, Chandrayaan – “moon car” in Sanskrit – will attempt to put a rover on the moon and establish India as a formidable force in space exploration.
The 43.5-meter Launch Vehicle Mark-III, or LVM3, will launch the spacecraft into Earth orbit, before passing through the moon to land on the south side of the moon on August 23.
If successful, Chandrayaan-3 will make India the fourth country to successfully land a spacecraft on the moon, joining the Soviet Union, the United States and China.
What are the objectives of the mission?
This project has three main objectives:
- First, it must achieve a safe and soft environment on the moon.
- Second, his Pragyan The rover must move around the surface of the moon.
- Third, it should conduct scientific research, considering how the moon was formed.
The six-wheeled Pragyan rover will have two payloads – two spectrometers that will try to find materials from the old lunar surface.
In addition, one payload, Spectro-polarimetry of Habitable Planet Earth (SHAPE), will measure spectral and polarimetric brightness and understand what potentially habitable Earth-like planets might look like.
The mission life of the rover and lander should be about one lunar day (about 14 Earth days).
– ISRO (@isro) July 5, 2023
The moon landing
Since 1958, there have been 70 successful and less successful missions by six countries to the moon – although most of them have only orbited the Earth’s satellite without landing. Another 41 flights did not fare well, according to NASA archive.
In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the United States and the USSR were the only countries that attempted lunar missions. Between them, the two Cold War fighters attempted 90 lunar missions, 40 of which were unsuccessful.
In the 1980s, no lunar missions were launched.
In 1990, Japan entered the space race with its own Heat Orbiter. In the 2000s, China, India and the European Space Agency launched their first missions to the moon.
In 2019, India’s Chandrayaan-2 mission successfully launched the interceptor but failed to connect with the lander and fell close to where Chandrayaan-3 will attempt to hit.
Can you see where it started?
Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), will be live streaming on its YouTube page. The service is expected to start approximately one hour before departure.