The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft on Saturday successfully entered the lunar orbit. If the rest of the current mission goes to plan, the mission will safely touch down near the Moon’s little-explored south pole between August 23 and 24. Since its launch on July 14, ISRO has been lifting the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft into orbits farther and farther away from Earth.
A day after Chandrayaan-3 entered the lunar orbit, the ISRO on Sunday released a video of the Moon ‘as viewed by Chandrayaan-3’. The space agency put out the video with a caption “Chandrayaan-3 Mission: The Moon, as viewed by Chandrayaan-3 during Lunar Orbit Insertion”.
India’s third unmanned Moon mission Chandrayaan-3 on Saturday successfully entered the lunar orbit, 22 days after it was launched for a far more complicated 41-day voyage to reach the lunar south pole where no other nation has gone before.
“I am feeling lunar gravity,” was Chandrayaan-3’s message to the ISRO after the required maneuver that brought it closer to the moon was carried out without any glitch from the space facility in Bengaluru. The injection into the lunar orbit marked a major milestone in the space agency’s ambitious Rs 600 crore mission.
The spacecraft has covered about two-thirds of the distance to the Moon since its launch on July 14 and the next 18 days will be crucial for the Indian Space Research Organisation(ISRO). The ISRO shared a message from the satellite to its centres, which read,” MOX, ISTRAC, this is Chandrayaan-3. I am feeling lunar gravity”. “Chandrayaan-3 has been successfully inserted into the lunar orbit. A retro-burning at the Perilune was commanded from the Mission Operations Complex (MOX), ISTRAC (ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network), Bengaluru,” the space agency said. Perilune is the spacecraft’s closest point to the moon. The next operation–reduction of orbit–will be done at 11 PM on Sunday, the ISRO said in a tweet.
After the Sunday maneuver tomorrow, there will be three more operations till August 17 following which the Landing Module Vikram carrying the rover Pragyan inside will break away from the Propulsion Module. After this, de-orbiting maneuvers will be carried on the lander before the final powered descent on the moon.
Shortly after Chandrayaan-3 took off on July 14 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh piggybacking on the heavylift LVM3-M4 rocket, ISRO Chairman S Somanath said if everything goes as per plan it will attempt the technically challenging soft landing on the lunar surface at 5.47 pm on August 23.
Over five moves in the three weeks since the launch on July 14, the ISRO has been lifting the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft into orbits farther and farther away from the Earth.
Then, on August 1 in a key maneuver — a slingshot move — the craft was sent successfully towards the moon from Earth’s orbit.
Following this trans-lunar injection, the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft escaped from orbiting the Earth and began following a path that would take it to the vicinity of the moon.
After reaching close to the moon, the spacecraft will need to be captured by its gravity. Once that happens, another series of manoeuvres will reduce the orbit of the spacecraft to a 100×100 km circular one.