India has launched a spacecraft into space on a mission to the far side of the moon in a follow-up bid to its failed effort nearly four years ago to land a rover softly on the lunar surface.
Chandrayaan-3, the word for “moon craft” in Sanskrit, blasted off from a launch pad in Sriharikota with an orbiter, a lander and a rover.
It will embark on a journey lasting slightly over a month before landing on the moon’s surface later in August.
Payload separation confirmed!#Chandrayaan3 is now separated from the cryo stage. pic.twitter.com/cVap3kMfDp
— ISRO Spaceflight (@ISROSpaceflight) July 14, 2023
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Applause and cheers swept through mission control at Satish Dhawan Space Centre, where Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) engineers and scientists celebrated as they monitored the launch.
“Congratulations India. Chandrayaan-3 has started its journey towards moon,” ISRO director Sreedhara Panicker Somanath said shortly after the launch.
Thousands of Indians cheered outside the mission control centre and waved the national flag as they watched the spacecraft rise into the sky.
“Chandrayaan-3 scripts a new chapter in India’s space odyssey. It soars high, elevating the dreams and ambitions of every Indian,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a tweet after the launch.
A successful landing would make India the fourth country — after the US, the Soviet Union and China — to achieve the feat.
The six-wheeled lander and rover module of Chandrayaan-3 is configured with payloads that would provide data to the scientific community on the properties of lunar soil and rocks, including chemical and elemental compositions, said Dr Jitendra Singh, junior minister for science and technology.
India’s previous attempt to land a robotic spacecraft near the moon’s little-explored south pole ended in failure in 2019.
It entered the lunar orbit but lost touch with its lander which crashed while making its final descent to deploy a rover to search for signs of water.
According to a failure analysis report submitted to ISRO, the crash was caused by a software glitch.
The £100 million mission in 2019 was intended to study permanently shadowed moon craters which are thought to contain water deposits and were confirmed by India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission in 2008.
This launch marks a 100% success rate of the LVM3 class rocket! #ISRO #Chandrayaan3 pic.twitter.com/QJwaxDi9R8
— ISRO Spaceflight (@ISROSpaceflight) July 14, 2023
ISRO director Mr Somanath said the main objective of the mission this time is a safe and soft landing on the moon.
He said the Indian space agency has perfected the art of reaching the moon, “but it is the landing that the agency is working on”.
Numerous countries and private companies are in a race to successfully land a spacecraft on the lunar surface.
In April, a Japanese company’s spacecraft apparently crashed while attempting to land on the moon. An Israeli non-profit tried to achieve a similar feat in 2019, but its spacecraft was destroyed on impact.
With nuclear-armed India emerging as the world’s fifth-largest economy, Mr Modi’s nationalist government is eager to show off the country’s prowess in security and technology.
India is using research from space and elsewhere to solve problems at home. Its space programme has already helped develop satellite, communication and remote-sensing technologies and has been used to gauge underground water levels and predict weather.
