ISRO Chandrayaan 3 launch live updates: India took its first step towards lunar soft landing with near-perfect Chandrayaan-3 launch. The LVM3 rocket has launched from the Sriharikota launchpad.
Chandrayaan 3 mission live updates: The health of the spacecraft is “normal”, the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) provided an update on the Chandrayaan-3 mission. Chandrayaan-3 is now in an orbit, which when closest to Earth is at 173 kilometres and farthest from Earth is at 41,762 km. The first orbit-raising maneuver (Earthbound firing-1) was successfully performed at ISTRAC/ISRO, Bengaluru, a statment on ISRO’s Twitter handle confirmed Saturday night. The mission was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota at 2.35 PM IST on Thursday, July 14. The lander will take nearly 42 days to complete its journey to the moon.
If Isro pulls this mission off successfully, India will join an exclusive list of just three other countries that have managed a soft landing on the Moon—the United States, the erstwhile Soviet Union and most recently, China. Both the United States and the Soviet Union crashed many spacecraft before they successfully landed on the Moon. China was the only country to succeed in its first attempt with the Chang’e-3 mission in 2013.
The spacecraft has successfully taken off from Earth and is now in orbit around the planet in its journey towards the Moon. It has many critical events lined up, including earth-bound manoeuvres, insertion into the lunar orbit, separation of the lander, a set of deboost manoeuvres and a power descent phase for a soft landing, according to P Veeramuthuvel, project director of the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft.
