ISRO prevents Chandrayaan-2 collision with NASA's Lunar Orbiter

The majestic lift-off of GSLV MkIII-M1 carrying Chandrayaan2 (Image: ISRO)

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Monday revealed that Chandrayaan-2 orbiter had performed a collision avoidance manoeuvre (CAM) in October with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).

“A very close conjunction between Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter (CH2O) and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of NASA was expected to occur on October 20 at 05:45 UTC (11:15am IST) near the Lunar North pole,” ISRO said.

The announcement added that both the agencies agreed that Chandrayaan-2 would undergo the CAM.

“The manoeuvre was scheduled for October 18, 2021. It was designed to ensure a sufficiently large radial separation at the next closest conjunction between the two spacecraft. The CAM was executed nominally at 14:52 UTC (8:22pm IST), on October 18,” it added.

“After orbit determination of CH2O with post-manoeuvre tracking data, it was reconfirmed that there would be no further close conjunctions with LRO in the near future with the achieved orbit,” the statement read.

Chandrayaan -2 and LRO orbit the moon in a nearly polar orbit and hence, both the spacecraft come close to each other over the lunar poles.

According to ISRO, it is common for satellites in Earth Orbit to undergo Collision Avoidance Manoeuvres to mitigate collision risk due to space objects, including space debris and operational spacecraft.

India’s Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft has completed more than 9,000 orbits around the Moon, and imaging and scientific instruments on board have been providing excellent data, ISRO Chairman K Sivan had said in September on the occasion of the completion of two years of operation of Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft.

The observations of the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter payloads have yielded discovery-class findings, according to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

There were eight scientific payloads hosted on the orbiter craft. These are: Chandrayaan-2 Large Area Soft X-ray Spectrometer (CLASS), Solar X-ray Monitor (XSM), CHandra's Atmospheric Compositional Explorer 2 (CHACE 2), Dual Frequency Synthetic Aperture Radar (DFSAR), Imaging Infra-Red Spectrometer (IIRS), Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC 2), Orbiter High Resolution Camera (OHRC), and Dual Frequency Radio Science (DFRS) experiment.