New Delhi, July 14 (BNA): An Indian spacecraft has blasted off on its way to the far side of the moon Friday in a follow-up mission to its failed efforts nearly four years ago to softly land a spacecraft on the lunar surface, the country’s spacecraft. Agency said.
Chandrayaan-3, the Sanskrit word for “moon vehicle”, took off from the launch pad in Sriharikota in southern India with an orbiter, lander and rover, in a display of India’s nascent space technology.
The spacecraft is scheduled to embark on a journey that will take just over a month before landing on the lunar surface later in August, according to the Associated Press.
Applause and cheers swept across Mission Control at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, as Indian Space Research Organization engineers and scientists celebrated as they watched the launch of the spacecraft.
A successful landing would make India the fourth country – after the United States, the Soviet Union and China – to achieve this feat.
said Dr Jitendra Singh, Chief Minister for Science and Technology.
India’s previous attempt to land a robotic spacecraft near the unexplored moon’s south pole ended in failure in 2019.
It entered lunar orbit but lost contact with the lander, which crashed during its final descent, to deploy a rover to search for signs of water.
According to the failure analysis report submitted to ISRO, the crash was caused by a software glitch.
The $140 million mission in 2019 was to study permanently shadowed craters on the moon that are believed to contain water deposits and was confirmed by India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission in 2008.
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