Chandrayaan-3

In News

• India plans to execute the Chandrayaan-3 mission in August 2022.
  • Progress was hampered due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

About

• The last major satellite launches by the ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) were the Earth Observation Satellite-3 in August 2021 and the Amazonia satellite in February 2021.
• The ISRO has planned 19 missions until December 2022 consisting of eight launch vehicle missions, seven spacecraft missions and four technology demonstrator missions.
• It has been allotted ?13,700 crores for this financial year, nearly ?1,000 crores more than it spent last year.
  •  Despite the several missions planned this year, the budgeted outlay this year is less than the ?13,949 crores allotted last year.

About Chandrayaan-3

• It is the third Moon mission of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the successor of the Chandrayaan-2 mission which aimed to land a rover on the lunar South Pole. 
  • It was sent aboard the country’s most powerful geosynchronous launch vehicle, the GSLV-Mk 3. 
  • However, lander Vikram, instead of a controlled landing, ended up crash-landing on September 7, 2019, and prevented rover Pragyaan from successfully travelling on the surface of the moon.
    •  Had the mission been successful, it would have been the first time a country landed its rover on the moon in its maiden attempt.
• It involves various processes, including finalisation of configuration, subsystems realisation, integration, spacecraft level detailed testing and a number of special tests to evaluate the system performance on earth. 
• It is critical for ISRO as it will demonstrate India’s capabilities to make landings for further interplanetary missions.

Source: TH