Chandrayaan-3, India’s third lunar mission, performed another significant manoeuvre on Monday and achieved a near-circular orbit around the moon.
As per the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Chandrayaan-3 made the significant move between 11:30 am to 12:30 pm today.
‘Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft undergoes another maneuver, achieves near-circular orbit around moon,’ ISRO posted on X (formerly Twitter).
As the mission progresses, a series of manoeuvres are being conducted by ISRO to gradually reduce Chandrayaan-3’s orbit and position it over the lunar poles.
This is the penultimate orbit reduction step to bring the spacecraft closer to the Moon, after which the landing module, comprising the lander and rover will break away from the propulsion module.
The next manoeuvre s on August 16.
The lander is expected to undergo a ‘deboost’ (the process of slowing down) and make a soft landing on the south-polar region of the Moon on August 23.
Chandrayaan-3 had entered into lunar orbit or the Moon’s orbit on August 5, after being launched on July 4.
The separation of the lander module from the propulsion module is scheduled for August 17, to set up the powered descent onto the lunar surface.
Chandrayaan-3 is a follow-on mission to Chandrayaan-2 to demonstrate end-to-end capability in safe landing and roving on the lunar surfacem, developing and demonstrating new technologies required for inter-planetary missions and to conduct in-situ scientific experiments.
It comprises an indigenous propulsion module, lander module, and a rover. The lander will have the capability to soft land at a specified lunar site and deploy the rover that will carry out the analysis of the Moon’s surface during the course of its mobility.
The propulsion module will carry the lander and rover configuration till 100 km lunar orbit.
The propulsion module has Spectro-polarimetry of Habitable Planet Earth (SHAPE) payload to study the spectral and polarimetric measurements of earth from the lunar orbit.
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