BENGALURU, July 14 (Portal) – India’s space agency on Friday launched a rocket that sent a spacecraft into orbit and on a planned landing next month on the lunar south pole, an unprecedented feat that would bolster India’s position as a major space power.
The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) LVM3 launch vehicle lifted off from the country’s main spaceport in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh on Friday afternoon, leaving a cloud of smoke and fire in its wake.
About 16 minutes later, ISRO Mission Control announced that the rocket had successfully placed the Chandrayaan-3 lander in an Earth orbit that would place it on a moon landing next month.
If the mission is successful, India would join a group of three other countries that have managed a controlled moon landing, including the United States, the former Soviet Union and China.
The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft would also be the first to land at the moon’s south pole, an area of particular interest to space agencies and private space companies due to the presence of water ice that could host a future space station.
The rocket launched at 14:35 local time (09:05 GMT) from India’s main spaceport. Over 1.4 million people watched the launch on ISRO’s YouTube channel, many bringing congratulations and the patriotic slogan “Jai Hind” (Victory for India).
India’s highly anticipated Chandrayaan-3 lunar mission is scheduled to launch on July 14, 2023. The logo of the Indian Space Research Organization is seen in this May 1, 2023 illustration. Portal/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Archive Photo
In 2019, ISRO’s Chandrayan-2 mission successfully deployed an orbiter, but the lander and rover were destroyed in a crash near where Chandrayan-3 will attempt to land.
Chandrayaan, which means ‘lunar rover’ in Sanskrit, includes a 2-metre-tall lander designed to station a rover near the moon’s south pole, where it is expected to remain operational for two weeks of experiments.
The moon landing is expected on August 23, ISRO said.
The launch is India’s first major mission since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government announced measures to boost investment in space launches and related satellite-based companies.
Modi previously said on Twitter that the moon mission “will carry forward the hopes and dreams of our nation.”
“As we enter the next 25 years, Mother India promises to play a leading global role in the emerging world scenario,” Deputy Minister of State for Science and Technology Jitendra Singh said at an event at the spaceport to celebrate the launch.
Since 2020, when India opened up to private launches, the number of space startups has more than doubled. Late last year Skyroot Aerospace, whose investors include Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, launched India’s first privately built rocket.
(This story was resubmitted in paragraph 7 to say that the Chandrayaan-2 mission was launched in 2019, not 2020.)
Reporting by Nivedita Bhattacharjee in Bengaluru; Adaptation by Kevin Krolicki, Jamie Freed and Mark Heinrich
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