After a few delays, India's Chandrayaan-2 mission is finally set to launch this weekend on July 15, aiming to land a rover on the surface of the moon.
It'll take off from the Satish Dhawan space port at Shriharikota, with both ISRO Chairman Dr K Sivan and President Ram Nath Kovind in attendance.?
Transportation of one rocket stage prior to integration - Images courtesy: ISRO
As of now, the Chandrayaan-2 mission will take off from Sriharikota at 2:51 am this Sunday. It will be launched into Earth Orbit, and subsequently put into a lunar transfer trajectory. Then, on September 6, the lander will make a soft landing on the Moon.
It's a historic moment for India, with this being our second mission to the Moon, and the first time we will actually touch down and put a rover on our natural satellite. The last time we launched a rocket to the Moon, the Chandrayaan-1 a decade ago, we became the country to uncover the first concrete evidence of liquid water on the Moon.
GSLV MK-III file photo
This is going to be an incredibly hype launch, and ISRO's biggest in years. As such, the state-run Doordarshan (DD) channel will live telecast the Chandrayaan22 launch. You can also follow Doordarshan on Youtube channel for a livestream, and Reliance Jio users can watch it on Jio TV.
And for some lucky people that jumped at the opportunity, ISRO is opening out the launch for public viewing at the launch site. Registrations have already closed since they started last week, so you're too late if you didn't get on it then.
Chandrayaan-2 will be launched on board the GSLV Mk-III. It will weigh about 3.8 tonnes in total, or about the equivalent of eight elephants according to ISRO chairman K Sivan. That's because the rocket will be carrying a number of different modular parts.
The Pragyaan rover on the ramp up to the Vikram lander
The rocket will be composed of three different parts, an orbiter, a lander called Vikram and a moon rover called Pragyan. The orbiter will stick around in lunar orbit to carry out bird's eye data analysis and microgravity experiments for the next year. The lander will carry other experimental setups to the Moon's surface. The rover will roll out once the lander makes touchdown, carrying out experiments for a single Lunar day (approximately 14 Earth days.)
Landing Moon, taking into consideration the thin atmosphere and low gravity, is a somewhat tricky task. If the Vikram lander successfully completes a soft landing, it'll make India only the fourth country to do this, after the US, Russia, and China. Though Israel had similarly tried a landing with its Beresheet spacecraft earlier this year, they ended up crashing into the Moon's surface.
The entire Chandrayaan mission has set ISRO back about Rs 978 crore. Rs 603 crore here went to developing the orbiter, lander, and rover, as well as navigational and ground support network. Rs 375 crore meanwhile went to building the GSLV Mk III heavy rocket. That's a budget almost 20 times smaller than similar launches by NASA.?
For instance, the US space agency spent about Rs 2,620 crore on a single Saturn V rocket launch during the Apollo Missions in 1969. Accounting for inflation, that would be the equivalent of a few billion dollars today.
Though this is an Indian mission, we're not shying away from helping the rest of the scientific community. The Chandrayaan-2 mission will carry 13 scientific satellites to the Moon, as well as a scientific payload for NASA. It's a laser retroreflector array that would let the space agency exactly pinpoint the distance of the Moon from the Earth at any given time.
Aside from simply exploring the South side of the Moon for the first time, ISRO's Pragyan rover will have other jobs too. One of those is inspecting the soil for helium-3 deposits, which will be crucial for future colonization missions, as it can be used to generate fusion energy.?
Another detail that's important to note is that this is the first time in ISRO's history that a space mission is being headed by women. Ritu Kridhal and M Vanitha are leading the mission as project and mission directors, respectively, and 30 percent of the mission scientists for Chandrayaan-2 are women.