India is likely to launch its third mission to the moon, Chandrayaan-3, in the third quarter next year, with the pandemic delaying the fabrication of the spacecraft. “Chandrayaan-3 is likely to be launched during the third quarter of 2022 assuming normal work-flow henceforth,” said a written answer in the Parliament by Dr Jitendra Singh, minister of state for the department of space.
The Chandrayaan-3 mission has been planned as only a lander-rover mission to demonstrate India’s capability of soft landing on a celestial body that will communicate with Earth via the existing orbiter from Chandrayaan-2 whose lifespan has been estimated to be seven years.
The third mission was announced just a few months after the Vikram lander aboard Chandrayaan-2 mission crash-landed on the lunar surface just 2.1 km from its goal in September 2019.
The mission was initially scheduled for late 2020 or early 2021, however, the pandemic affected the schedule for manufacturing the modules.
“The realisation of Chandrayaan-3 involves various processes, including finalisation of configuration, subsystem realisation (manufacturing), integration, spacecraft-level detailed testing and a number of special tests to evaluate the systems performance on Earth. The realisation process was hampered due to Covid-19 pandemic,” the answer in Lok Sabha read.Before the second wave of the pandemic in April-May, the Indian Space Research Organisation had already manufactured the propulsion system and tests were ongoing. The lander and propulsion systems were being integrated and several tests were planned for mid-2021.
A successful landing would have made India the fourth country in the world to do so after the US, the erstwhile USSR and China, and the first country to have landed so close to the lunar South Pole.
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