Chennai

India's lunar spacecraft Chandrayaan-3, which commenced its journey at 2.35 pm (local time) on Friday, is expected to cover the 3,84,000 kilometres from Earth to Moon in about 40 days and make a soft landing at 5.47 pm (Indian time) on August 23.

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In his post-launch media interaction, ISRO Chairman, Dr S Somanath revealed the date and time, referring to it as the targeted landing time, if all went well. With a mission life of one lunar day (14 Earth days), Chandrayaan-3 is meant to land near the lunar south pole (approximately at 80 degrees latitude).

It is imperative for the mission's 'Vikram' lander to touch down on the lunar surface at the start of the lunar day in order to make use of available sunlight (using solar panels and batteries) and operate its science payloads, sensors, gather data and communicate it back to Earth.

ISRO's Chandrayaan-3 is meant to land a few hundred kilometres away from the Moon’s south pole—a region that has largely remained unexplored, owing to the near-nil sunlight illumination there.

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It is believed that many mysteries of the Moon could be unravelled by performing in-situ probing of this region. 

In case things don’t go as planned and there is a delay in the landing, ISRO also has the option of allowing the spacecraft to circle the Moon and carry out the landing at the break of the following lunar dawn (which could be almost a month after the intended landing date of August 23).

Chandrayaan 3 successfully launched to the moon | ISRO | Sriharikota

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Lunar landing is a complex process and poses various challenges — the gravity on the Moon is 1/6th that of Earth, therefore an object that weights 60kg on Earth would weigh only 10kg.

The lunar landing has to be done based on the on-board programming and decision-making of the spacecraft, as it would not be possible to communicate the decisions from Earth in real-time. The uneven terrain on the lunar surface, the presence of rocks, mountains, boulders etc. pose challenges for smooth landings. 

However, learning various lessons from ISRO's Chandrayan-2, which was unable to make soft lunar landing, ISRO carried out hundreds of tests on its Chandrayaan-3 lander and ensured that it is ruggedised, made more robust, and failure-tolerant.

Also read | India's Chandrayaan-3 is now in space, historic journey to Moon begins

"We have ensured that the four landing legs can withstand landing impacts of up to 3 metres/second, instead of the five engine configuration on Chandrayaan-2, we've used four engines on Chandrayaan-3, while the previous lander utilised only a single engine for soft-landing, this mission will utilise two engines" M Sanakaran, the Director of ISRO's UR Rao Satellite Centre had explained to WION. 

ISRO has also made several modifications on the software, hardware and sensors to ensure that Chandrayaan-3 can execute the lunar landing and make history for India.

Also read | PM Modi about successful launch of India’s third lunar mission

So far, only the US, Russia and China have soft-landed their crafts on the Moon and America has even performed multiple manned lunar missions and will be reviving its manned programme by putting astronauts back on the Moon, as part of the Artemis Programme.

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