ISRO's Chandrayaan-3 heads towards the moon, here's what's next for the mission

The organisation had earlier mentioned of attempting a soft landing on lunar surface.

The India Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on August 1 announced that Chandrayaan-3 has successfully completed its orbit around the Earth, thus commencing its journey towards the Moon.

In conversation with PTI, ISRO stated that post the trans-lunar injection, Chandrayaan-3 successfully departed from the Earth’s orbit and is now on the journey towards the moon. The organisation had earlier mentioned of attempting a soft landing on lunar surface.

"Chandrayaan-3 completes its orbits around the Earth and heads towards the moon," the national space agency said, adding, "Next stop: the moon. As it arrives at the moon, the Lunar-Orbit Insertion is planned for August 5, 2023," stated ISRO.

As per the operators of the spacecraft, ISRO, the three main objectives of this $77 million mission are to perform a safe landing near the south pole of the lunar surface, deploy a rover as well as demonstrate its operating along with performing experiments that are scientific in nature over the course of 14 days.

There are some goals that the organisation plans to achieve before the spacecraft reaches the moon. ISRO has divided Chandrayaan-3’s journey to the moon into three different steps-the Earth centric phase, the lunar transfer phase and the moon-centric phase.

The first phase has been completed, with the pre-launch as well as launch of the aircraft. Chandrayaan-3 has already completed its orbits around the Earth, and with every consecutive revolution around the earth, the spacecraft increased its distance from our planet. The final orbit helped Chandrayaan-3’s place towards a lunar transfer trajectory and it is now making its way to the Moon (phase 2).

Scheduled to insert itself into a lunar orbit thus kicking off phase 3, the spacecraft will then orbit the Moon precisely four times, and will draw itself closer to the lunar surface with each consecutive revolution.

The lander is supposed to touch the south polar region of the Moon at a speed of 5mph. The propulsion module of Chandrayaan-3 is will be staying in the orbit around the moon, thus remaining in communication with both the rover and the lander.

Explaining to the Times of India the delayed touchdown of Chandrayaan-3’s lander and the rover, ISRO Chairman Sreedhara Panicker Somanath said, “Landing will be on August 23 or 24, as we want the landing to happen when the sun rises on the moon, so we get 14 to 15 days to work. If landing cannot happen on these two dates, we'll wait for another month and land in September."

ISRO has implemented multiple in Chadrayaan-3 ever since the unfortunate crash of Chandrayaan-2, Somnath further told the aforementioned publication that these improvements include the strengthening of the lander’s legs, an increase in the landing-speed tolerance, as well as an addition of new sensors in order to measure the approach speed of the same.