ISRO on Wednesday announced that the launch of Chandrayaan-3 has been scheduled for mid-July. ISRO Chairman S Somnath said the agency is now awaiting its integration with the rocket.
“The Chandrayaan-3 is already fully built, assembled inside the fairing and we are waiting for integration with the rocket. Currently, the window of opportunity is between 12-19 of July, and we will take the earliest possible date,” Somnath said.
VIDEO | Chandrayaan-3 to be launched in July. "The Chandrayaan-3 is already fully built, assembled inside the fairing and we are waiting for integration with the rocket. Currently, the window of opportunity is between 12-19 of July, and we will take the earliest possible date,"… pic.twitter.com/oQhTARAJu9
— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) June 28, 2023
The ISRO chief said that the window of opportunity to launch is between 12-19 July and the exact date will be announced once all tests are complete. Even so, some reports say the launch date has been fixed 13 July at 2.30 pm. It will be launched by Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark-III from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota.
Chandrayaan-3 is India’s third lunar mission and a follow-on mission to Chandrayaan-2 to demonstrate end-to-end capability in safe landing and roving on the lunar surface. Chandrayaan-3 consists of an indigenous Lander module (LM), a Propulsion module (PM) and a Rover with the objective of developing and demonstrating new technologies required for Interplanetary missions.
The GSLV-Mk3 will place the integrated module in an Elliptic Parking Orbit (EPO) of around 170 x 36500 km size.
The propulsion module will carry the LM from launch vehicle injection till final lunar 100 km circular polar orbit and separate the LM from the PM. The propulsion module has a Spectro-polarimetry of Habitable Planet Earth (SHAPE) payload to study the spectral and Polari metric measurements of Earth from the lunar orbit. It has been added as a value addition which will be operated after the separation of the Lander Module.
The Lander will have the capability to soft land at a specified lunar site and deploy the Rover which will carry out in-situ chemical analysis of the lunar surface during the course of its mobility. The Lander and the Rover have scientific payloads to carry out experiments on the lunar surface.
The Lander will carry several instruments to study the lunar surface. These include Surface Thermophysical Experiment (ChaSTE) to measure the thermal conductivity and temperature, an instrument for Lunar Seismic Activity (ILSA) for measuring the seismicity around the landing site, and Langmuir Probe (LP) to estimate the plasma density and its variations. A passive Laser Retroreflector Array from NASA is also accommodated for lunar laser ranging studies.
The rover module will carry Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) and Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS) for deriving the elemental composition in the vicinity of the landing site.
The mission objectives of Chandrayaan-3 are:
To demonstrate Safe and Soft Landing on Lunar Surface
To demonstrate Rover roving on the moon and
To conduct in-situ scientific experiments.
The launch was originally scheduled for 2021 but was postponed owing to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Aditya-L1 Mission
The ISRO chief also gave an update on Aditya-L1 Mission, India’s first mission to study the sun. “Satellites are now getting integrated. Payloads have been developed by various agencies. It has reached the satellite center. Payloads are getting integrated into satellites and it will go through a series of testing,” he said.
#WATCH | ISRO chief S Somanath gives an update on Aditya-L1 Mission, India's first mission to study the Sun.
— ANI (@ANI) June 28, 2023
He says, "…We are targeting that by August end, Aditya can go." pic.twitter.com/qyOexGlUfw
ISRO’s target is to launch Aditya-L1 by the end of August this year.
Aditya L1 will be the first space-based Indian mission to study the Sun. The spacecraft shall be placed in a halo orbit around the Lagrange point 1 (L1) of the Sun-Earth system, which is about 1.5 million km from the Earth. A satellite placed in the halo orbit around the L1 point has the major advantage of continuously viewing the Sun without any occultation/eclipses. This will provide a greater advantage of observing the solar activities and their effect on space weather in real-time.
The spacecraft carries seven payloads to observe the photosphere, chromosphere and the outermost layers of the Sun (the corona) using electromagnetic and particle and magnetic field detectors.
