Chandrayaan-3, India’s third moon mission, successfully launched

India's Chandrayaan-3 mission successfully launched on July 14, aiming to soft-land on Moon on August 23 or 24. LVM-3 carrying satellite took off from Sriharikota, with the objective of developing and demonstrating new technologies for inter-planetary missions.

India’s third moon mission, Chandrayaan-3 has been successfully launched as the Launch Vehicle Mark-3 (LVM-3) with the satellite onboard took off from the second launch pad of the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota at 2.35 pm on July 14.

This is India’s attempt to do a soft landing on the lunar surface for the second time having failed in 2019 with the Chandrayaan-2 mission.

Also read: Chandrayaan-3 launch LIVE news

So far only three countries, the U.S., Russia and China have successfully soft-landed on the Moon.

At approximately 16.157 minutes after the LVM-3 lifted off from the launch pad, the satellite separation took place, the integrated module (comprising a propulsion module, lander module and rover) was placed a in an Elliptic Parking Orbit (EPO) of size ~170 x 36500 km.

The Chandrayaan-3 consists of an indigenous propulsion module (PM), lander module (LM) and a rover with an objective of developing and demonstrating new technologies required for inter-planetary missions.

The propulsion module will carry the lander and rover from injection orbit to till 100 km lunar orbit. It also carries a Spectro-polarimetry of Habitable Planetary Earth (SHAPE) payload to study the spectral and polarimetric measurements of earth from the lunar orbit.