Bangalore. Chandrayaan-3 on Wednesday successfully entered the fifth and final orbit of Earth’s only satellite, bringing it even closer to the Moon’s surface.
The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) said that with this, Chandrayaan-3 has completed its process to reach the Moon and will now prepare to separate the propulsion module and the lander module.
ISRO posted on X (formerly Twitter), “Today’s successful operation was necessary for a short period of time. Under this, Chandrayaan-3 was established in the orbit of 153 km x 163 km of the Moon, which we had estimated.
With this, the process of entering the Moon’s range was completed. Now the propulsion module and the lander are ready to separate. ISRO said that on August 17, there is a plan to separate the lander module from the propulsion module of Chandrayaan-3.
Chandrayaan-3 entered the Moon’s orbit on August 5 after its launch on July 14. After this, it entered the next orbits of the Moon on August 6, 9 and 14 and kept getting closer to it.
After separation, the lander is expected to undergo a “deboost” (slowing down process) to place it in an orbit where the perilune (closest point to the moon) is 30 km and the apolune (farthest point from the moon) is 30 km away. point) is 100 kms.ISRO said that from here on August 23, soft landing of the vehicle will be attempted on the south polar region of the Moon.
ISRO chairman S. Somnath had recently said that the most important part of the landing is the process of bringing the lander’s velocity from an altitude of 30 km to the final landing and the ability to move the vehicle from horizontal to vertical is the “process where we have to show our capability”. Will happen.
Somnath said, “The velocity at the beginning of the landing process is about 1.68 kilometers per second, but this speed is horizontal to the lunar surface. Here Chandrayaan-3 is tilted almost 90 degrees, it has to be made vertical.
This whole process of changing from horizontal to vertical direction is a very interesting calculation mathematically. We have repeated this process several times. This is where we had problems last time (Chandrayaan-2).
