Launch Of Chandrayaan-3, India's Moon Mission, Pushed Back By A Day

India's tryst with the Moon will now have to wait one more day. 

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which had announced last week that its highly anticipated lunar mission, Chandrayaan-3, would lift off on July 13, said today that the launch has been pushed back by a day. 

The launch is now scheduled for July 14 at 2.35 pm and will take place at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. ISRO Chairman S Somanath said the lander is expected to soft-land on the lunar surface on August 23 or 24.

Announcing the launch of Chandrayaan-3:

🚀LVM3-M4/Chandrayaan-3 🛰️Mission:
The launch is now scheduled for
📆July 14, 2023, at 2:35 pm IST
from SDSC, Sriharikota

Stay tuned for the updates!

— ISRO (@isro) July 6, 2023

The mission is India's third venture to the moon and follows the Chandrayaan-2 mission in 2019. While that mission had managed to orbit the moon, the Vikram lander had suffered a hard landing, which had prevented the rover from being deployed as planned.

Yesterday, the space agency had announced that it had successfully integrated the encapsulated assembly containing the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft with the Launch Vehicle Mark 3 (LVM3), its new heavy-lift launch vehicle.

Chandrayaan-3 consists of a lander module, propulsion module and a rover and aims to develop and demonstrate new technologies required for inter-planetary missions. There are three primary objectives of the mission: To demonstrate a safe and soft landing on the lunar surface; to demonstrate the rover's roving capabilities on the Moon; and to conduct scientific experiments.

The lander payloads that the mission will carry are Chandra's Surface Thermophysical Experiment (ChaSTE) to measure the thermal conductivity and temperature; Langmuir Probe, to estimate the plasma density and its variations; and the Instrument for Lunar Seismic Activity (ILSA) for measuring the seismicity around the landing site. It will also carry a passive Laser Retroreflector Array from NASA for lunar laser-ranging studies.