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Mark-III (LVM3) M4 with Chandrayaan-3 at the launch pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota. (Twitter/@isro)
ISRO is scheduled to launch the Chandrayaan-3 moon mission at 2.35pm aboard the Mark 3 (LVM3) launch vehicle from the Sriharikota spaceport on July 14.
Scientists from the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) carried a scale model of Chandrayaan-3 to offer prayers at the Tirupati temple on Friday as the space agency prepares to start the launch countdown at 1pm.
The Chandrayaan-3 mission is scheduled to launch at 2.35pm aboard the Mark 3 (LVM3) launch vehicle from the Sriharikota spaceport on July 14. It will be a follow-up mission after the Chandrayaan-2 landing in September. 2019 due to a software glitch.
According to ISRO President Somanath, while Chandrayaan-2 had a success-based design, Chandrayaan-3 has a failure-based design.
We have expanded the landing area from 500m x 500m to four km by 2.5km. It can land anywhere, so you are not limited to aiming for a specific point. It will only target a specific point in nominal circumstances. So, if it performs poorly, it could land anywhere within that region,” Somnath said.
On Monday, he shared minute details about what went wrong with the Vikram of Chandrayaan-2 lander as it hurtled down toward the designated 500m x 500m landing spot on the lunar surface with engines designed to reduce its speed and develop higher-than-expected thrust. .
“The fundamental problems were, one of them was we had five engines that were used to reduce speed, which is called retardation. Those engines developed higher thrust than expected,” he told reporters.
Somanath said that when such a higher trend occurs, errors accumulate due to this lag over a period.
“All the errors accumulated, and it was higher than we expected. The vehicle had to rotate very quickly. When it started to rotate very quickly, its ability to rotate was limited by the software, because we did not expect such high rates in the future. The second case.”
The third reason for the failure, he said, was the small 500m x 500m site designated for the spacecraft’s landing.
Chandrayaan-3 is also said to have more fuel so that it will have a greater ability to travel, handle scattering, or fly to an alternate landing site.
The ISRO chief said the Vikram lander now has additional solar panels on other surfaces to ensure it generates power no matter how it descends.
“We asked if it would descend at a higher speed, what would happen? Can’t it descend? Then we increased the vertical velocity component from 2m/s to 3m/s and tested it completely.
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