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.
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.
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