India’s most powerful rocket, GSLVMKIII or LVM-3, integrated with Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft has landed in Sriharikota and will soon be for the country’s third mission to the Moon in July. Chandrayaan-3 consists of an indigenous lander module, propulsion module and a rover with an objective of developing and demonstrating new technologies required for inter-planetary missions, Isro stated.
Speaking to the media, Isro chairman S Somanath said, “Isro is planning to launch the Chandrayaan-3 mission in July. The window for the mission launch will be from July 12 onwards.” Before its arrival in Sriharikota, Chandrayaan-3 had successfully passed several key tests, demon-strating its capacity to survive the challenging acoustic environment that the spacecraft would have to deal with during its lunar launch. Somnath had said while the mission parameters would remain the same, “the design and engineering are significantly different, compared to Chandrayaan-2 to make it more robust and avoid the problems (that led to the crash landing of the lander during the last mission) from last time”.
Chandrayaan-3 will lift off from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in July to go into an elliptical orbit around the Moon, before attempting to soft-land on the south pole side of the Moon.