CHENNAI: The countdown for Chandrayaan-3 mission, which will take off at 2:35pm on Friday from Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota, began on Thursday afternoon. The mission aims to demonstrate ISRO’s capability of landing safely on the moon. If successful, India will be the fourth nation to achieve this rare feat, apart from the US, China and erstwhile USSR.
Chandrayaan-2, launched in 2019, failed as the Vikram lander crash-landed due to software and hardware errors. Recently, ISRO chairman S Somanath, while detailing the reasons for failure of Chandrayaan-2, said, “We had five engines which were used to reduce the velocity, which is called the retardation. These engines developed higher thrust than what was expected. That extra thrust led to accumulation of errors, which in turn, compromised the stability of the lander during the camera coasting phase. The craft had to make very fast turns. When it started to turn very fast, its ability to turn was limited by the software because we never expected such high rates,” he said.
In a nutshell, Chandrayaan-2 had limited parameters to handle failure scenarios. “So, what we did this time is simply to expand it further. Look at what are the things that can go wrong. So, instead of success-based design in Chandrayaan-2, we have done a failure-based design in Chandrayaan-3. What all can fail, and how to protect it - this is the approach that we have taken,” Somnath said.
If everything goes as per plan, Chandrayaan-3 will be the world’s first mission to soft-land near the lunar south pole. The tentative landing date that ISRO scientists are hoping to achieve is August 23-24 when the sunlight availability is maximum. The mission life of the lander and rover is one lunar day, which is 14 earth days.
Components for mission supplied from Coimbatore
CHENNAI: Larsen and Toubro’s aerospace manufacturing facility in Coimbatore has supplied space hardware produced at the facility for Chandrayaan-3 mission. The facility was also involved in supply of ground and flight umbilical plates. AT Ramchandani, executive V-P and head, L&T Defence, said that the components produced at L&T facility in Coimbatore fulfilled stringent quality and timeline requirements. He said L&T has been involved in the mission starting from manufacturing subsystems till mission tracking and has been playing a key role in integration of launch vehicles for the Indian space programme. L&T has also commissioned the Deep Space Networking Antenna at Byalalu required for exploratory missions.