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Today, at the Satish Dhawan Space Center, Sriharikota, the envelope cluster containing Chandrayaan-3 is mated to LVM3. pic.twitter.com/4sUxxps5Ah
– ISRO (isro) July 5, 2023
Chandrayaan-3 missionSet to be launched between July 12-19, it will be India’s second attempt to land a spacecraft on the moon. The Chandrayaan-2 mission, launched on July 22, 2019, partially failed after the lander and rover crashed into the lunar surface during the early hours of September 6.
Why is Chandrayaan-3 merged with LVM3?
The Chandrayaan-3 rocket, consisting of a lander, a rover and a propulsion unit, cannot travel into space on its own. It must be attached – like any satellite – to launch vehicles or missiles, like LVM3 in this case. Rockets have powerful propulsion systems that generate a huge amount of energy needed to lift heavy objects like satellites into space, overcoming Earth’s gravity.
What is LVM3?
LVM3 is India’s heaviest missile, with a gross take-off weight of 640 tons, a total length of 43.5 meters and a diameter of 5 meters (nose-shaped equipment to protect the missile from aerodynamic forces). The launch vehicle can carry up to 8 tons of payload to low Earth orbit (LEO), which is about 200 km above the Earth’s surface. But when it comes to the Geostationary Transport Orbiter (GTO), which lies far ahead, some 35,000 kilometers from Earth, it can carry much less than that, only about four tons.
However, this does not mean that the LVM3 is weak compared to missiles used by other countries or space companies for similar functions. For example, the European Space Agency (ESA) Ariane5 rocket has a mass of 780 tons and can carry 20 tons of payload to LEO and 10 tons to the GTO.
LVM3 made its first flight into space in 2014 and also carried Chandrayaan-2 in 2019. And recently, in March this year, it laid 36 OneWeb satellites, It weighs about 6,000 kg, is in LEO, demonstrating its ability to send multiple satellites into space. This was the second time that LVM3 had been commercially launched – the first came in October 2022 when it handed over the OneWeb India-1 assignment.
What are the different components of LVM3?
Rockets have several detachable parts to save energy. They burn different types of fuel to power the rocket. Once they run out of fuel, they detach from the rocket and fall, often burning up in the atmosphere due to the friction of the air, and are destroyed. Only a small portion of the original rocket goes to the intended destination of the satellite, like Chandrayaan-3. Once the satellite is finally ejected, this last part of the rocket either becomes a piece of space debris or burns up again after falling into the atmosphere.
LVM3 is essentially a three-stage launch vehicle, including two solid boosters (S200), a liquid-fuel-based primary stage (L110), and a cryogenic upper stage (C25).
According to Isro: “The vehicle takes off with the simultaneous ignition of two S200 boosters. The primary stage (L110) is ignited at approximately 113 seconds (sec) during flight, while the S200 stages fire. Both S200 engines burn for approximately 134 seconds and separation occurs at 137 seconds. Payload separation occurs at 115 km and at approximately 217 sec during L110 firing Burnout, L110 separation and C25 ignition occur at 313 sec The spacecraft is injected into a GTO (Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit) orbit of 180 x 36000 km at a nominal time of 974 second “.
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