Moonshot moment: India’s stakes claim as space power
Leading up to the launch, HT takes a look at why the third lunar mission is significant for furthering India’s space ambitions
Chandryaan-3, the successor to India’s ongoing series of lunar missions, Chandrayaan-1 and 2, is set to launch on July 14, with the target of making India only the fourth nation in the world to successfully land its spacecraft on the surface of the moon.

Also read: ISRO's Chandrayaan-3 launch today: Live stream and timeline details
Isro chairman S Somanath, in an interview with HT earlier this week, said that his organisation is fully prepared for the launch and has taken its lessons from the shortcomings of Chandrayaan-2 – it launched on July 22, 2019, and made what Isro described as a “hard landing” on September 6 – to go forward with a so-called “failure-based” design for Chandrayaan-3.
“We are prepared for the launch. Since Chandrayaan-2, we have rectified the errors, and have improved the spacecraft to be more flexible to possible problems,” Somanath said.
The success of Chandrayaan-3 is critical not just from the scientific perspective but also because it forms the backbone of the country’s aspiration of being at the forefront of global space and scientific developments in the near future.
Leading up to the launch, HT takes a look at why the third lunar mission is significant for furthering India’s space ambitions, and how this will pave way for future international collaborations.
What the mission entails
Chandrayaan-3 aims to pick up from where Chandrayaan-2 left off. With the mission, Isro aims to demonstrate its end-to-end capability in safe landing and roving on the surface of the moon.
It has three objectives — to demonstrate safe and soft landing on the moon surface (which could not be achieved with Chandrayaan-2), to demonstrate rover abilities on the moon surface, and to conduct in-situ scientific experiments.
Chandrayaan-3 will launch on-board the Launch Vehicle Mark-3 (LVM-3) rocket, previously known as Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) Mk-III – a 640-tonne behemoth that has now achieved back-to-back success in six mission launches. The launch will take place from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota, at 2.35pm on July 14.
The 43.5m-tall rocket will carry on it and deploy into space the two modules that form Chandrayaan-3 – a propulsion module, and a lander module. The propulsion module is designed to ferry the lander module, which will also contain the lunar rover within it, to a 100km lunar orbit.
The propulsion module contains a single experimental payload – Spectro-polarimetry of Habitable Planet Earth, or SHAPE – that will study the spectro-polarimetric signatures (the polarisation of light emitted by celestial objects) of Earth in the near-infrared wavelength for 3-6 months as it orbits the moon, according to Isro.
The 1,724-kg lander, which is equipped to “soft land” at a specified lunar site, contains three payloads that will have a mission life of a lunar day (or 14 Earth days) – one each to measure surface plasma density, thermal levels, and seismic activity.
A 26-kg rover will roll out of the lander on the lunar surface and will drive around and carry out in-situ chemical analysis of the lunar surface during in the single lunar day it will be active.
Isro chief, Somanath said that Chandrayaan-3 is expected to start lunar orbit nearly a month after its launch, and its lander and rover are expected to land on the moon on August 23.
The landing site is near the south pole (around 300km from the lunar south pole) at 70° latitude. If all goes to plan, India will become thefirst country in the world to soft-land near the lunar south pole.
Before this, all other lunar missions have only managed to make a landing in the equatorial region of the moon — a few degrees north or south of the equator. Nasa’s Surveyor-7, which landed near 40° South latitude in 1968, is the furthest that any spacecraft has landed from the equator.
So, what lessons were learnt from Chandrayaan-2?
A senior Isro scientist involved in the Chandryaan-3 mission explained that Chandrayaan-2 went well till the final phase of its intended mission plan, but it could not make a soft landing. Soft landings, when a craft touches down at a safe, slow and controlled speed, are particularly critical on crewed missions or missions in which the spacecraft is expected perform scientific experiments and tests after landing.
The Chandrayaan-2 orbiter, however, is currently functional and continues to provide critical data to Isro.
Also read: Where Chandrayaan-3 lies in the historical context of lunar exploration
“We landed with a higher velocity – we call this a crash landing. But if you analyse the mission in its entirety, we have perfected the part of reaching up to the moon. We did it during Chandrayaan-1, Chandrayaan-2 and also during the Mars orbiter mission,” the official explained.
The analysis report prepared by Isro after Chandrayaan-2 highlighted that the five engines that were used for the reduction of velocity, developed a higher entry thrust than was intended. The intention was for the lander to lose most of its velocity by the time it was around 400m from the lunar surface and start the process of hovering above the intended landing site to ensure a soft vertical descent. The extra speed, however, caused it to crash on the moon’s surface, Somanath explained in the interview.
Another roadblock that Chandryaan-2 came across was that the landing spot was limited to 500m by 500m, which did not provide enough flexibility for the craft to overcome possible errors and still ensure safe landing. This time the marked landing area has been increased to 4km by 2.5 km.
A major change from Chandrayaan-2, is that Chandrayaan-3 will focus on a major orbiter this time, since the scientific objective for the orbiter was already achieved in the second mission. Isro has also increased the fuel capacity so that it can move to an alternative landing site, in case of an unforeseen problem during landing.
Ajey Lele, consultant at Manohar Parrikar Institute for defence studies and analyses, said that learnings from Chandrayaan-2 have led to many improvements, which appears to go in Isro’s favour this time.
“During Chandrayaan-2, we could not manage a soft landing as intended. But the learnings from this mission have helped improve the science and technology aspects of Chandrayaan-3, which is extremely important,” Lele said.
Competing missions around the world
While India is racing to become the fourth country to land on the moon – the United States, the former Soviet Union and China have already achieved it – there are other countries also in the fray with ambitious lunar missions lined up in the weeks following Chandrayaan-3.
After much delay, Russia’s space agency Roscosmos announced earlier this year that it will be launching its robotic Luna 25 lander on July 13. However, the mission is still coping with delays, and is now scheduled to launch in August. Luna 25 will be Russia’s first lunar expedition since the fall of the Soviet Union, the last mission being the Luna 24 lunar sample return in 1976. The mission was earlier scheduled for 2021, but has missed deadlines repeatedly. The spacecraft, which is due to fly on-board a Soyuz-2.1b, will also target the lunar south polar region, where it will operate for at least a year.
Meanwhile, Japan’s space agency — the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) — earlier this week announced the launch date for its X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) and the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) mission, for August 26. XRISM mission, in association with Nasa and the European Space Agency, is a replacement for Japan’s Hitomi X-ray astronomy satellite, which failed a month after its launch in February 2016. SLIM hopes to make Japan join the elite club of lunar landing nations, and will perform a precision landing on the lunar surface.
