Chandrayaan-3 India’s Mission To The Moon

India has launched Chandrayaan-3 on 14th July 2023 at 14:35 HRS IST (Chandrayaan is a sanskrit word, it means moon vehicle). Even the Indian PM Narendra Modi shared the mission launch. The cost of this mission is INR 615 crores (AUD 109.5 million | USD 74.8 million). The launch was conducted by Indian Space Research Organisation ISRO. This was ISRO’s most difficult mission to date. In 2019, when Chandrayan-2 was launched, the spacecraft was able to deliver the payload into the moon’s orbit, but it was not able to make the soft landing successfully. With Chandrayaan-3 India has made a comeback to accomplish the mission to the moon.

What is Chandrayaan?

Moon as earth’s satellite is not close to our planet. The fact is there is a huge distance between the moon and the earth. The distance is so huge that all the planets of our solar system can fit in between. In reality the Moon is very far from earth, around 384,400 km. The Moon is not just a satellite but it has become a geopolitical milestone. Historically USSR Soviet Union was the first to to reach on Moon with Luna-2, a decade later the United States Apollo 11 mission led Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to walk on its surface. And most recently China completed a successful mission to perform a soft landing on the moon and release the rover Yutu-2.

India is poised to become the fourth nation to achieve this milestone with this current mission Chandrayaan-3. Soft landing an autonomous vehicle on the surface of moon means a technological advance achievement. Which till now was mostly in the hands of three nations and providing them the edge over other space agencies. If ISRO proves that they can execute a soft landing successfully, then sky’s the limit. India can then join the other important international space projects. The projects which until now were only managed by agencies like NASA. This brings in new streams of contracts and the world’s most economical space agency will be able to generate a lot of revenue from these projects.

History of India’s moon fantasy.

In the year 2008 India started with its first mission Chandrayaan-1, it was a Moon Impact Probe. The mission was conducted as a hard landing. In 2019, India conducted a second mission to moon, the Chandrayaan-2. They key focus of the second mission was to achieve a soft landing on the moon. In this second mission, the rocket launch was successful, the journey to the moon was also successful. But it was the soft landing on the surface of the moon, where the technical issues in software lead to failure. The spacecraft was only half a km away from the surface when it lost contact with the mission control centre and fell on the moon’s surface.
The mission was quite ambitious, where ISRO wanted to release a rover named VIKRAM on the moon’s surface. The key task of this rover was to study the moon’s surface for water and key minerals.

Current Mission

The Chandrayaan-3 mission was released with many changes, not only to the software, but heaps of updates were made to the lander structure, landing engine, and communication equipment. The lessons learnt from the last mission and key findings were deeply studied to improve the third mission to moon. There are a few key points to note about this Indian mission, the landing location of the spacecraft. Moon as a satellite revolves around the earth, we are only able to see one specific side of the moon. The other side of the moon has never seen a ray of sunshine. The surface of the moon is filled with craters that were created over time due to space debris landing on its surface. These craters are of the key interest for scientists to understand the availability of water and key elements of the periodic table like iron, sodium, gold, silver, rare earth minerals, hydrogen, mercury on the moon. Studying the surface and sending the specimen back to earth will provide such details to humans.

The launch vehicle for Chandrayaan-3 was LVM3, which is different to the rocket used for launching the Chandrayaan-2 GSLV Mark-2. The new rocket has the capacity to carry 30% more payload compared to previous iterations. The lander structure was upgraded to provide more strength during landing. The lander engine was upgraded to a high powered engine.

Compared to the last mission – which had 3 components “Lander, Rover and Orbiter” , the current mission only has two major components “Lander and Rover”.

Chandrayaan-3 Lander payloads:

Chandra’s Surface Thermophysical Experiment (ChaSTE) to measure the thermal conductivity and temperature; Instrument for Lunar Seismic Activity (ILSA) for measuring the seismicity around the landing site; Langmuir Probe (LP) to estimate the plasma density and its variations. A passive Laser Retroreflector Array from NASA is accommodated for lunar laser ranging studies.

Chandrayaan-3 Rover payloads:

Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) and Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS) for deriving the elemental composition in the vicinity of landing site.

The cost of this mission is even lesser compared to Chandrayaan-2. If we compare it to some of the Hollywoods movies, India is able to send the objects to space at much lower cost. All credit goes to the founders of ISRO, who convinced the Indian government to invest in space programs and created a home grown space agency that is converting dreams to reality.

Why is India conducting a space mission?

The Chandrayaan mission is important not only for India’s space program but also for India’s economy. India got its freedom from British rule in 1947, since then it is trying to get back on its feet. Space program and technical edge in this field brings back the lost glory. The country is doing every bit on its own, which countries like the US have achieved by importing the best talent from all over the world. India is only investing less than 1% of its GDP in the space program. These missions conducted by ISRO have brought in various contracts from other nations to launch their satellites. In addition, India is surrounded by some harsh neighbours on both east and west. To monitor its territories from space, ISRO has been instrumental since its beginnings. It has also launched multiple weather monitoring satellites. India is building its own cluster of GPS and wifi over space satellites.

Space is a multi-billion dollar industry and India is poised to command a fair share of it. Success of missions like Chandrayaan-3 will lead India to join a technologically advance group of nations.