ISRO Chandrayaan 3 launch live updates: The LVM3 rocket has launched from the Sriharikota launchpad.
The Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) Chandrayaan-3 mission has launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota at 2.35 PM IST on Thursday, July 14. The lander will take nearly 42 days to complete its journey to the moon.
If Isro pulls this mission off successfully, India will join an exclusive list of just three other countries that have managed a soft landing on the Moon—the United States, the erstwhile Soviet Union and most recently, China. Both the United States and the Soviet Union crashed many spacecraft before they successfully landed on the Moon. China was the only country to succeed in its first attempt with the Chang’e-3 mission in 2013.
The spacecraft has successfully taken off from Earth and is now in orbit around the planet in its journey towards the Moon. It has many critical events lined up, including earth-bound manoeuvres, insertion into the lunar orbit, separation of the lander, a set of deboost manoeuvres and a power descent phase for a soft landing, according to P Veeramuthuvel, project director of the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft.
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Live Blog
The Chandrayaan-3 mission is now in an injection orbit around Earth, where it will engage itself in orbit-raising manoeuvres.
The primary objective of the Chandrayaan-3 mission is to achieve a soft landing on the Moon. It follows in the footsteps of the Chandrayaan-2 mission, which ended in failure in 2019. The mission will be India’s contribution to what can be termed a bit of a new space race. The United States is planning humanity’s return to the Moon with the Artemis program. China, meanwhile, is planning multiple unmanned missions to the Moon after finding what could turn out to be a valuable mineral on the Moon.
But it is not as easy as it sounds. The path to a soft landing on the Moon is littered with hazards that could end the mission in the blink of an eye. Chandrayaan-2, Israel’s Beresheet and Japan’s Hakuto are fairly recent missions which underlined that fact with their failures.
Hopefully, the launch itself should not be problematic because ISRO has already gone through the exact same motions with Chandrayaan-2. That mission only went off course during the crucial final minutes before the landing. During that time, the spacecraft’s onboard systems have to make quick calculations and correct its course autonomously to ensure a soft landing on the Moon.
The launch itself is something ISRO has already carried out multiple times, with the Chandrayaan-3 mission being LVM-3’s fourth operational mission.
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First published on: 14-07-2023 at 07:31 IST
