Chandrayaan-3: All Eyes On The Landing in August
The India Commentary view
View all posts by this Author
By Our Editorial Team
First publised on 2023-07-17 06:46:54
About the Author
The India Commentary view
View all posts by this Author
The successful, near-perfect launching from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota and the perfect first maneuver to put Chandrayaan-3 in an elevated orbit are more feathers in ISRO's cap. Learning from the mistakes that led to the disappointment of Chandrayaan-2 not making a landing on the moon, ISRO has fine-tunes processes and added several mechanisms to avoid such a situation. It is hoped that in the last week of August, ISRO will be able to make a safe and soft landing on the moon to confirm India as only the fourth nation in the world, after the USA, Russia and China, to do so. Since the Chandrayaan-2 mission had failed, the principal aims of Chandrayaan-3 remain the same - demonstrate safe and soft landing, demonstrate rover operations on the moon and conduct on-site scientific experiments on the lunar surface.
But ISRO's aims and ambitions go beyond Chandrayaan-3 and the moon. It will be a milestone in its space journey no doubt but with Gaganyaan, India's first manned space mission lined up after this, the future is exciting. There is also no doubt that making a landing on any planetary body opens up many possibilities for the future and gives the space agency huge confidence in exploring other planetary bodies and it will also allow ISRO to build on the success and take up more ambitious missions in future.
The failure of Chandrayaan-2 and the pandemic have pushed back ISRO's timeline in many projects. However, it has kept itself busy by launching satellites and other research work. But with the launch of Chandrayaan-3, ISRO is now poised to take up more such projects, either alone or in collaboration with other space agencies. India has already signed the Artemis Accords, which seeks to send humans to the moon again by 2025, with the ultimate goal of expanding space exploration to Mars and beyond. ISRO is likely to play a huge role in that.
