Chandrayaan-3: Difficulties the spacecraft can face to land on the Moon?
Moon almost fifty years ago, however, to date, this remains an extremely difficult task to achieve. On 21 July 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first person to step onto the Moon. He was joined by Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin 19 minutes later.
ISRO has last attempted to send an unmanned spacecraft to the lunar surface in 2019, the Chandrayaan-2. The mission failed in September 2019 when the Vikram lander crashed into the Moon’s surface. Notably, there were other failed missions to moon from other countries in the same year.
The Israel-led Beresheet mission failed in early 2019. Further in 2023 April, the Japanese Hakuto-R mission also failed to complete a soft landing on the Moon . These are only a few examples of the several missions that failed to land on Moon. In the 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union crashed spacecraft after spacecraft till they finally succeeded landing one. China is the only other country that completed a soft landing on the Moon and it did that on its first try with the Chang’e-5 mission in 2013. Reaching the Moon comes much later in a Mission to Moon.
Long before a spacecraft reaches Earth's only natural satellite, it needs to figure out how to safely make the 3,84,400 kilometres journey. That is a long long road to carefully avert failure. To be far more specific, making the journey out of earth's Orbit and entering the Moon's Orbit even before landing on the lunar surface is a task in itself. NASA has earlier dumped a moon mission because a failure in the spacecraft’s propulsion system meant that it could not enter the lunar orbit.
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