India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft with a lander and a rover lifted off from the Sriharikota Space Center on Friday at 2:35 pm local time. The probe will reach the moon on August 23 or 24. If the mission is successful, he said, India will be the fourth country to land on the moon, after the United States, the former Soviet Union and China. BBC.
Thousands of people watched the launch from the control room at the launch site, and commentators described the sight of the missile “soaring through the sky” as “magnificent”. The launch was met with cheers and standing ovations from the audience and the scientists.
All this happened 13 years after the country’s first lunar mission launched in 2008, Milswamy Annadurai, which carried out “the first and most detailed survey of water on the lunar surface and found that the moon is surrounded by an atmosphere during the day.” Chandrayaan-1 Project Manager.
The probe weighs about 1,500 kilograms and carries in its belly the 26-kilogram rover, called Pradjna, which means wisdom in Sanskrit.
After liftoff on Friday, the spacecraft will take about 15 to 20 days to enter lunar orbit. The scientists will then begin to reduce the rocket’s speed over the coming weeks to reach a point that allows Vikram to land safely.
If all goes according to plan, the six-wheeled rover will circle rocks and craters on the lunar surface and collect critical data and images to send back to Earth for analysis.
The moon’s south pole remains largely unexplored – the shaded area there is much larger than that of the moon’s north pole, which means that water may exist in permanently shaded areas. Chandrayaan-1 was the first to detect water on the Moon near the South Pole in 2008.
