Chandrayaan-3 is set to be launched today from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh. It is scheduled to be launched at 2.35 pm. Conducted by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), this is India’s third lunar mission. Chandrayaan-3 is a follow-on mission to Chandrayaan-2 to demonstrate end-to-end capability in safe landing and roving on the lunar surface. The Chandraayan-3 mission consists of an indigenous lander module a propulsion module and a rover with the objective of developing and demonstrating new technologies required for Inter planetary missions.
According to Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Chandrayaan-3 is equipped with a lander, a rover and a propulsion module. It weighs around 3,900 kilograms. It also carries a payload to “look at Earth from Moon to study its habitable planet-like features and use this information to explore exoplanets in future.”
With today’s event, India aims to become the fourth country to successfully achieve a soft landing on the moon. The United States, China, the Soviet Union and Israel are other countries that attempted a soft landing on the moon. Except for Israel, all three were successful in making a soft landing on the lunar surface.
According to ISRO, the three mission objectives of the Chandrayaan-3 are- to demonstrate safe and soft landing on lunar Surface; to demonstrate Rover roving on the moon and to conduct in-situ scientific experiments.
