Chandrayaan-3 Lander To Make Major Manoeuvre Today, Slow Down Near Moon

Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft's lander Vikram, which successfully separated from its propulsion module and continued its journey towards the Moon yesterday, will undergo a deboosting manoeuvre today at 4:00 pm today.

Deboosting is a critical step for the lander before its soft landing attempt on the Moon on August 23. The lander will need to slow down to enter an elliptical orbit around the Moon, with the closest point of 30 kilometres and the farthest point of 100 kilometres. Over the next five days, the lander will undergo two successive orbital-reduction manoeuvres.

"'Thanks for the ride, mate!' said the Lander Module (LM). LM is successfully separated from the Propulsion Module (PM). LM is set to descend to a slightly lower orbit upon a deboosting planned for tomorrow around 1600 Hrs, IST," ISRO wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Chandrayaan-3 was launched into space by the LVM3 rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota on July 14 and entered lunar orbit on August 5.

Once on the Moon, the lander Vikram will photograph the Pragyaan rover, which will deploy its instruments to study seismic activity on the lunar surface.

The propulsion module also carries the Spectro-polarimetry of Habitable Planet Earth (SHAPE) payload, which will analyse the light from Earth to study its spectral and polarimetric properties.

Chandrayaan-3 is a follow-up mission to Chandrayaan-2 that will attempt to land a spacecraft on the moon and deploy a rover to explore the lunar surface. The rover will collect data on the composition and geology of the moon, which will help scientists learn more about the history and evolution of our nearest celestial neighbour.

The spacecraft is carrying six payloads to study the lunar soil and capture photographs of Earth from the lunar orbit.