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The next Chandrayaan 3 mission will be launched in July this year, as confirmed by S Somanath, who is the chief of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). Talking on the sidelines after the launch of the GSLV F12/NVS -1 rocket on Monday, Somanath shared the update regarding the next lunar mission in the agenda for ISRO this year.

Chandrayaan 3 is the successor mission to the Chandrayaan 2 which faced challenges to finish its landing manoeuvre and the space agency had to abort the mission and learn from the issues faced by the spacecraft to land in the challenging portion of the Moon. “In this business (space missions), the possibility of failure is always there,” he was quoted saying in an ANI report.

The Chandrayaan 3 mission rocket will be launched by an LVM3 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. While confirming that the Chandrayaan 3 mission will launch in July, the ISRO chief did not give an exact timeline (date) for the rocket launch, which is likely to be revealed in the coming weeks.

Like the previous version, Chandrayaan 3 will be entrusted with safely landing and roving on the Lunar surface, for which the space agency will be equipping the spacecraft with a Lander and a Rover to undertake its mission. “The propulsion module will carry the lander and rover configuration till 100 km lunar orbit. The propulsion module has Spectro-polarimetry of Habitable Planet Earth (SHAPE) payload to study the spectral and Polari metric measurements of Earth from the lunar orbit,” as explained by ISRO in its post.

ISRO on Monday successfully launched its Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) from the second launch pad at Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota.

The primary objective of this mission is to deploy the NVS-01 navigation satellite, which weighs approximately 2,232 kilograms. This satellite belongs to the second generation of satellites envisioned for the Navigation with Indian Constellation series.

With the successful completion of this mission, India will join the exclusive list of just three other countries in the world. Around 20 minutes after launch, the satellite will be injected into a geosynchronous transfer orbit, marking a significant milestone in India’s space exploration journey.