Chandrayaan-3 Successfully Lifts Off On Ambitious Mission to the Moon

SRIHARIKOTA: Chandrayaan-3, the third lunar exploration mission from India, made a successful lift-off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh at 2.35 PM on Friday afternoon, as bystanders cheered and people watching on screens rejoiced.

With this ambitious mission to the moon, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) bids to place India among just four nations that have achieved a soft landing on the Moon's surface.

Visuals from across India showed people cheering for Chandrayaan-3, extending their congratulations to ISRO for the successful lift-off and in anticipation of the mission's success ahead of the launch today. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is in France for the Bastille Day celebrations, also took to Twitter this morning, expressing optimism about the mission and saying it will carry the “hopes and dreams of India.”

The mission is a follow-up to the ISRO’s Chandrayaan-2, which failed to make the desired controlled and soft landing on the lunar surface nearly four years ago in September 2019, when the lander failed to communicate with the ground stations at an altitude just 2.1 km away from the surface of the Moon.

Chandrayaan-3 is set to make a journey of over a month before it goes in for a controlled landing on the lunar surface in August. If everything goes according to plan, the mission will place India as the only one of four nations, after the United States, the former Soviet Union and China, to make this accomplishment.

The ISRO stated the three main objectives of this Rs 615 crore mission as accomplishing a safe and soft landing on the Moon, to demonstrate the roving capacity of the Moon Rover on its surface and study its environment.

The spacecraft comprises a six-wheeled lander and rover module, with configured payloads to provide data relating to the moon's surface.

“Chandrayaan-3 consists of an indigenous Lander module (LM), Propulsion module (PM) and a Rover with an objective of developing and demonstrating new technologies required for interplanetary missions,” the ISRO explained on its website about the project.

ISRO and former scientists previously associated with the space agency, including its ex-chairman Madhavan Nair and scientist Nambi Narayan, expressed a high degree of confidence about the successful outcome of the mission. Both Nair and Narayan observed that the ISRO has studied the data gathered from the near- miss Chandrayaan-2 mission, factoring in all elements and studying past mistakes so as not to repeat them this time.

Narayan was confident that Chandrayaan-3 will prove to be a game changer for India.

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