Mission Chandrayaan-3

05 Feb 2022 Mission Chandrayaan-3

Posted at 14:46h in Daily current-affairs by khyati khare 0 Comments

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Recently information has been shared by the Department of Space that India plans to launch Chandrayaan-3 mission in August 2022.

The Chandrayaan-3 mission is a follow-up/successor mission to the July 2019 Chandrayaan-2 mission aimed at landing a rover on the Moon’s South Pole.
After the failure of the Vikram lander, a need was felt to search for another mission to demonstrate landing capabilities, which is possible through the proposed Lunar Polar Exploration Mission in partnership with Japan in 2024.
It will have an orbiter and a landing module. However, this orbiter will not be equipped with scientific instruments like Chandrayaan-2.
Its work will be limited to taking the lander to the moon, monitoring the landing from its orbit and communication between the lander and the earth station.

Chandrayaan-2 consisted of an orbiter, lander and rover, all of which were equipped with scientific instruments to study the moons.
The orbiter observed the Moon in an orbit of 100 km, while the lander and rover modules were separated to perform a soft landing on the lunar surface.
ISRO named the lander module after Vikram, the pioneer of India’s space program Vikram Sarabhai and the rover module was named Pragyan which means- knowledge.
It was flown by the country’s most powerful Geosynchronous Launch Vehicle, GSLV-Mk 3.
However, instead of a controlled landing by Lander Vikram, a crash-landing took place due to which the rover Pragyan could not be successfully placed on the lunar surface.

The Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle-Mk 3 (GSLV-Mk 3) is a high propulsion capability vehicle developed by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). It is a three-stage vehicle designed to launch communication satellites into geostationary orbit.
It has a mass of 640 tonnes which can place 8,000 kg payload into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and 4000 kg payload into GTO (Geo-synchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO).

Polar orbit:

A polar orbit is an orbit in which a body or satellite passes over the poles from north to south and takes about 90 minutes to make one complete revolution.
The inclination of these orbits is close to 90 degrees. From here almost every part of the earth can be seen by satellite as the earth rotates beneath it.
These satellites have many applications such as monitoring of crops, global security, measuring ozone concentration in the stratosphere or measuring the temperature in the atmosphere.
Almost all satellites in polar orbit have a low altitude.
An orbit is said to be sun-synchronous because the angle between the center of the Earth and the line joining the satellite and the Sun remains constant throughout the orbit.
These orbits, also known as “Low Earth Orbits (LEO)”, enable the onboard camera to take images of the Earth in the same sun-illuminated conditions during each trip. Thus it makes the satellite useful for monitoring the earth’s resources.
It always passes over some point on the surface of the earth.

Geosynchronous Orbit:

Geosynchronous satellites are launched into orbit in the same direction as the Earth is rotating.
When the satellite is in orbit at a specific altitude (about 36,000 km from the Earth’s surface), it orbits at the same speed as the Earth is rotating.
While geostationary orbits also fall under the category of geosynchronous orbits, they have the special property of being in orbits above the equator.
In the case of geostationary satellites, the Earth’s gravitational force is sufficient to provide the necessary acceleration for circular motion.
Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO): To achieve Geosynchronous Orbit or Geostationary Orbit, a spacecraft is first launched into Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit.
From GTO the spacecraft uses its engines to move into geostationary and geosynchronous orbit.