Why in News:

• The government announced that Chandrayaan-3 mission is likely to be launched in late 2022.

Details of the mission

• The Chandrayaan-2 mission, launched in 2019, was scheduled to be an effort aimed at landing a rover on the Lunar South Pole.
• It was sent aboard the country’s most powerful geosynchronous launch vehicle, the GSLV-Mk 3.
• However, the lander Vikram, instead of a controlled landing, ended up crash-landing and obstructed the effort at having the rover Pragyaan successfully travel on the surface of the moon.
• The Chandrayaan-3 is the successor to the Chandrayaan-2 mission and it will likely attempt another soft-landing on the lunar surface.
• It also involves various processes, including finalisation of configuration, subsystems realisation, integration, spacecraft level detailed testing and a number of special tests to evaluate the system performance on earth.

Additional Information

Significance of Chandrayaan 2

• Chandrayaan 2’s Terrain Mapping Camera took photos of nearly 4 million square kilometres of the Moon’s surface
• ISRO’s Orbiter High-Resolution Camera scouts future landing sites for Moon missions
• Chandrayaan 2’s Dual frequency Synthetic Aperture Radar(DFSAR) found lunar craters that may contain water
• Chandrayaan-2 Large Area Soft X-ray Spectrometer (CLASS) found aluminium and calcium on the far side of the Moon

 Reference:

1. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/chandrayaan-3-likely-to-be-launched-during-third-quarter-of-2022-jitendra-singh/article35578074.ece