India launches mission to be the fourth country to land on the Moon – 7/9/2023 – Sidereal Messenger
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India launches this Friday (14) the mission that could make it the fourth country to perform a soft landing on the Moon. Chandrayaan-3 (“Lunar Spacecraft-3”) will depart at 6:05 am (Brasília, 2:35 pm in India) from the Satish Dhawan Space Center, on the island of Sriharikota, on an LVM3 rocket, also developed by the Indians.
The mission profile repeats what had been done on Chandrayaan-2, which failed in its attempt to land a landing in 2019. First the spacecraft is placed in an elliptical Earth orbit that is gradually expanded until the departure for the Moon, performing followed by a corresponding descending spiral around the natural satellite, until it stabilized in a circular orbit about 100 km from the surface of the Moon. All this takes about a month to happen.
From there, the Vikran lander will begin the final approach to the surface, while a separate propulsion module will remain in lunar orbit serving as a relay for the lander’s radio signals. The Chandrayaan-2 mission orbiter, still in operation and successfully conducting its scientific lunar observation mission, will serve as a backup for communications. The descent of Chandrayaan-3 is scheduled for August 23, in a region close to the lunar south pole.
On the first attempt, the Indians had a problem with the on-board computer software, which ended up leading the probe to perform the final phase of the landing at a higher speed than expected, impacting the surface at about 200 km / h – far above the required for a safe landing (7.2 km/h). The whole process needs to happen in an automated way, without intervention from mission control on Earth.
To date, only the US, Russia and China have managed to carry out unmanned smooth descents on lunar soil. The competition for fourth place is fierce. The first country to try was Israel, through the company SpaceIL, which operated the Beresheet module until a collision with the surface, in April 2019. Then came the Indians, with Chandrayaan-2, in September of that same year. And in April of this year, almost Japan achieved the feat, through the company ispace, with its Hakuto-R module. Once again, the astronautical community witnessed the loss of a lander just a few meters from the surface. Now India’s chance to inscribe its name in the annals of space exploration once again returns.
If the Vikram (“Valor”) module manages to make a soft landing, it will have a mission of about 14 days on the lunar soil (basically the time it takes for nightfall there, since the vehicle was not designed to survive the low night temperatures ), with four instruments. He also takes with him a small rover, the Pragyan (“Wisdom”), with two other scientific pieces of equipment, designed to analyze the composition of the surface at the landing site. The project has an estimated cost of US$ 77 million and the spacecraft is an improved version of the one that flew in 2019. As a second attempt, it has a better chance of achieving success. But landing on the moon is never easy. We’ll see.
This column is published on Mondays in the printed version, in Folha Corrida.
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