Reaching for the moon: The next Chandrayaan
₹386 crore Chandrayaan-1 was successful. Its orbiter kept orbiting around the Moon for 312 days conducting experiments while its impact probe landed on the lunar surface and discovered signs of water. The ₹850 crore Chandrayaan-2’s mandate was bigger.
It involved placing the spacecraft in lower lunar orbit and soft landing a rover on the South Pole of the Moon. While the first part was successful, the lander was lost due to a software problem. India thus lost the opportunity of becoming the fourth nation in the world, after the US, Russia and China, to soft land an object in the Moon.
The ₹615 crore Chandrayaan-3 is a follow-up mission of Chandrayaan-2 with same architecture but with modifications to overcome past shortcomings. Isro’s LMV 3 rocket will inject the spacecraft into orbit. Its propulsion module will take it to a lower lunar orbit and the lander will then soft land a rover on the lunar surface sometime in late August.
Yes, but they are yet to be approved by the government. Isro sees Chandrayaan missions as a means to develop and demonstrate tech required for interplanetary probes. It plans to progressively deepen its research on the Moon.
With Chandrayaan-1, it established its expertise in orbiting the Moon and crashing a probe into the lunar surface. It now wants to soft land on the Moon and rove on it with Chandrayaan-3. It plans to drill, collect samples, test them on-site and ultimately, bring samples back to Earth through future missions.
The US Apollo Programme not only put the first man on the Moon, it also sent 11 other astronauts to the Moon in 1969-72. But high costs and other priorities (an international space station) led to it being shut down. Moon was forgotten for a few decades.
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