To study Moon from its surface, Earth from orbit

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Final landing planned on August 23 will be tracked by Isro’s Bengaluru station; success will make India only the fourth nation to soft-land on the lunar surfaceChandrayaan-3, India’s third Moon mission, has an added ‘desi’ element to it. “Unlike Chandrayaan-2, when the landing was tracked through a Madrid (NASA-JPL) station, this time we will track the lander from our Isro Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (Istrac) station in Bengaluru,” said a senior scientist. “As per calculations now, Vikram should land on Moon at 5.

47pm on August 23; it may change due to variations in mission profile. ” While all of Istrac’s stations will track the Friday launch, spacecraft separation will be captured by stations at Brunei and Biak (Indonesia). While eight Chandrayaan-2 payloads have been sending remotesensing data since 2019, Chandrayaan-3 will add seven more scientific instruments, including one that will go around Moon and six on the lunar surface.

Chandrayaan-3 is not just a vast improvement on the Indian Space Research Organisation’s second Moon mission, it also carries a payload to “look at Earth from Moon to study its habitable planet-like features and use this information to explore exoplanets in future”. Vikram carries four payloads: One to look for moonquakes, the second to study how the surface allows heat to flow through it, the third to understand the plasma environment, and the last to help measure the distance between Earth and Moon more accurately. The two payloads on Pragyan (rover) will study the composition of Moon’s surface using X Ray and laser.