Isro’s third lunar mission, Chandrayaan-3, launched into orbit, marking a successful launch for India.

SRIHARIKOTA: Isro on Friday successfully launched the LVM3 in its fourth operational mission and put the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft into the intended orbit.
★The launch vehicle’s smooth performance has added to Isro’s confidence, which has spent nearly four years planning its third lunar mission.
★Mission director Mohan Kumar and the Isro chairman reiterated how the LVM3 has grown to become Isro’s most reliable heavy-lift rocket.
★Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted his congratulations and saluted the ingenuity of the scientists.
★Chandrayaan-3, India’s third lunar mission and the country’s second attempt at soft-landing on Moon, is a follow-on mission to Chandrayaan-2.
★If all goes as per plan, the Chandrayaan-3 lander, Vikram, should touch down on the lunar surface at around 5.47pm on August 23.
★Istrac’s Bengaluru centre will take control of the satellite to perform multiple Earth-bound manoeuvres.
★From here, the journey towards Moon — called trans-lunar insertion phase — will begin.
★After lunar orbit insertion, Isro will perform a series of manoeuvres to take the craft to a circular orbit of 100km where the lander module will separate.
★While eight Chandrayaan-2 payloads have been sending remote-sensing data since 2019, Chandrayaan-3 will add seven more scientific instruments.
★Although the initial plan for the propulsion module was restricted to transporting Vikram and Pragyan to a lunar orbit, Isro later added one payload that will “look at Earth from Moon to study its habitable planet-like features and use this information to explore exoplanets in the future”.
★Other than this, Vikram carries four payloads of which one will study moonquakes, the second will study how Moon’s surface allows heat to flow through it, the third will understand the plasma environment, while the fourth will help measure the distance between Earth and Moon accurately.

Source: Times of India