MOONSHOT MOMENT

Launching today, Chandrayaan-3 hopes to make India the 4th country to land on the moon's surface. A look at how the mission forms the backbone of the country's aspiration of being at the forefront of global space and scientific developments in the near future.

- Soumya Pillai

Chandryaan-3, the successor to India’s ongoing series of lunar missions, Chandrayaan-1 and 2, is set to launch on July 14, with the target of making India only the fourth nation in the world to successfully land its spacecraft on the surface of the moon.

Isro chairman S Somanath, in an interview with HT earlier this week, said that his organisation is fully prepared for the launch and has taken its lessons from the shortcomings of Chandrayaan-2 – it launched on July 22, 2019, and made what Isro described as a “hard landing” on September 6 – to go forward with a so-called “failure-based” design for Chandrayaan-3.

“We are prepared for the launch. Since Chandrayaan-2, we have rectified the errors, and have improved the spacecraft to be more flexible to possible problems,” Somanath said.

The success of Chandrayaan-3 is critical not just from the scientific perspective but also because it forms the backbone of the country’s aspiration of being at the forefront of global space and scientific developments in the near future.

Leading up to the launch, HT takes a look at why the third lunar mission is significant for furthering India’s space ambitions, and how this will pave way for future international collaborations.

What the mission entails

Chandrayaan-3 aims to pick up from where Chandrayaan-2 left off. With the mission, Isro aims to demonstrate its end-to-end capability in safe landing and roving on the surface of the moon.

It has three objectives — to demonstrate safe and soft landing on the moon surface (which could not be achieved with Chandrayaan-2), to demonstrate rover abilities on the moon surface, and to conduct in-situ scientific experiments.