India To Launch Third Moon Mission Chandrayaan 3 In 2021, To Carry Lander And Rover

India is preparing to send a fresh mission to the Moon. The mission will be officially called Chandrayaan 3. The Indian Space Research Organisation aims to launch the mission in early 2021. The announcement was made by the Department of Space. The upcoming Moon mission will be different this time. The Chandrayaan 3 will not carry an orbiter. It will blast off from Earth with a lander and a rover. This will be India’s third lunar mission in over a little a decade. The mission was earlier slated for launch in 2020, but the coronavirus outbreak delayed the project. The ISRO is aiming to achieve a soft landing on Moon. This will be the second attempt by the ISRO to land a rover on the south pole of Moon’s surface.

The Indian space agency wants to explore the Moon. It had made an unsuccessful attempt to send a lander and a rover on the lunar surface in 2019. The objective of Chandrayaan 3 is to map and study its surface composition and abundance of water present on the Moon. The ISRO said that it will use Chandrayaan 2 orbiter to establish contact with the Chandrayaan 3’s lander and rover. Several countries have made attempts to land at the south pole in the past. If the mission yields a positive result, India will become the first country to land where no country has gone before till date.

Chandrayaan 1 was the first Indian mission. It was launched in October 2008 and included an orbiter. It operated till August 2009. The second one — Chandrayaan 2 was launched in September 2019. The mission included an orbiter, a lander, and a rover. While the orbiter was placed in the lunar orbit successfully, the lander couldn’t touch down the Moon surface smoothly. It had deviated from its defined trajectory minutes before the landing. All the three orbiter, lander, and rover were developed by the ISRO in India. According to ISRO’s claim, it had developed its technology to launch a mission to explore the Moon.