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07-08-2023
Bureau Report + Agencies
NEW DELHI: India’s latest space mission, Chandrayaan-3, has entered the moon’s orbit more than three weeks after its launch, the country’s space agency said on Saturday.
The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) confirmed that Chandrayaan-3, which means moon vehicle in Sanskrit, had been “successfully inserted into the lunar orbit”.
If the rest of the current mission goes to plan, the mission will safely touch down near the moons little-explored South Pole between August 23 and 24.
India’s last attempt to do so ended in failure four years ago, when ground control lost contact moments before landing.
Developed by ISRO, Chandrayaan-3 includes a lander module named Vikram, which means “valour” in Sanskrit, and a rover named Pragyan, the Sanskrit word for wisdom.
It is a major milestone for the country that has run its ambitious aerospace program on a comparatively low budget. Only Russia, the United States and China have previously achieved a controlled landing on the lunar surface.
The mission comes with a price tag of $74.6m – far smaller than those of other countries, and a testament to India’s frugal space engineering.
Experts say India can keep costs low by copying and adapting existing space technology, and thanks to an abundance of highly skilled engineers who earn a fraction of their foreign counterparts’ wages.
The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft has taken much longer to reach the moon than the manned Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, which arrived in a matter of days.
The Indian rocket used is much less powerful than the United States’ Saturn V and instead the probe orbited Earth five or six times elliptically to gain speed, before being sent on a month-long lunar trajectory.
If the landing is successful the rover will roll off Vikram and explore the nearby lunar area, gathering images to be sent back to Earth for analysis.
The rover has a mission life of one lunar day or 14 Earth days.
ISRO chief S Somanath has said his engineers carefully studied data from the last failed mission and tried their best to fix the glitches.
India’s space program has grown considerably in size and momentum since it first sent a probe to orbit the moon in 2008.
In 2014, it became the first Asian nation to put a satellite into orbit around Mars, and three years later, the ISRO launched 104 satellites in a single mission.
