Recently, G. Madavan Nair, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), announced a blast to the media: the Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander, which was scheduled to launch in August 2022, will be postponed until 2023. As soon as the news came out, the space industry was in an uproar, and another space project was postponed.
In March 2022, the European Space Agency announced the termination of cooperation with the Russian Space Agency on the "ExoMars" Mars rover, so the "ExoMars" Mars rover, which was scheduled to launch in September 2022, had to be postponed indefinitely, and the 2024 Mars launch window may not necessarily catch up.
The delay in the launch of the "ExoMars" Mars probe is due to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, and the European Space Agency has stopped all cooperation with the Russian Space Agency, so what is the reason for the delay in the launch of the Indian Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander?
What is the reason for the delay in the launch of Chandrayaan-3?
Chandrayaan 3 is the indian space research organization's second lunar mission, on September 7, 2019, the Indian Chandrayaan 2 lander performed its first lunar mission, suddenly lost contact at the last moment of the lunar landing, hard landing on the moon, Chandrayaan 2 0.335 km altitude forever frozen on the big screen of the Indian Space Research Organization flight control center, the first lunar landing declared failure.
Later, the United States lunar probe found the remains of the Indian Chandrayaan 2 lander on the moon, which looked relatively complete and was lost, and the experts of the Indian Space Research Organization were ecstatic, unfortunately, they had not been able to get in touch with the Chandrayaan 2 lander, and finally had to give up.
The Indian Chandrayaan-3 lunar landing is only allowed to succeed and not fail, the research team is particularly cautious, at present, the Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander is still in the slow assembly stage, the research team is testing the stability of important systems, not allowing errors to occur again.
The reason for the delay in launching Chandrayaan-3 may be that the research team may not have found the main cause of the failure of the last lunar landing, so the stability of the important systems was tested one by one, which will definitely take time.
What is the difference between Chandrayaan 3 and Chandrayaan 2?
Chandrayaan-2 consists of three parts: the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter, the Vikram lander, and the Pragyan lunar rover.
The Chandrayaan-2 orbiter weighs 2379 kg and carries 8 scientific instruments, the terrain mapping camera TMC 2, the X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometer, the solar X-ray monitor (XSM), the high-resolution camera, the infrared imaging spectrometer, the dual-frequency synthetic aperture radar, the atmospheric composition detector, the dual-frequency radio science.
The Vikram lander weighs 1471 kilograms and carries three scientific instruments, the ionospheric analysis and radio analyzer, Chandra's surface thermophysics experiment, and the lunar seismic activity control instrument.
The Pragyan lunar rover weighs 27 kilograms and carries two scientific instruments, the Alpha Particle Ray Spectrometer and the Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectrometer.
Despite the destruction of the lander and lunar rover during hard landing, chandrayaan-2 orbiter has been in operation so far that in November 2021, in order to avoid a collision between the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter and NASA's lunar orbiter, the Indian Space Research Organization (IRORO) had chandrayaan-2 orbiter undergo a retracement maneuver.
In March 2022, the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter discovered exciting material beneath the lunar surface, and discovered Argon-40, or argon-40, in the thin lunar escape layer, an inert, colorless and odorless gas whose isotope argon-40 is radioactive and originates below the lunar surface and after diffusion, leakage and fault in intergrandular space, to the lunar exodus layer.
Having introduced so much, is it already a certain understanding of India's Chandrayaan 2, so is this related to Chandrayaan 3? Of course, there is a relationship, without the technical foundation of Chandrayaan 2, there would be no Chandrayaan 3 today.
Chandrayaan-3 differs from Chandrayaan-2: Chandrayaan-3 consists of two parts, the lunar lander and the lunar rover, and there is no lunar orbiter, because the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter is still working normally around the moon, which also leads to Chandrayaan-3 making certain improvements on the basis of Chandrayaan-2.
Chandrayaan 3 or landed in the chandrayaan 2 before the site of no successful landing, if successful landing, will release a lunar rover weighing only 27 kilograms, open the Indian lunar exploration program, but unfortunately in August 2022 can not be launched, we can only wait a little longer, look at 2023.
In addition, India has also postponed the launch of the manned Gaganyaan crew module, which is a spacecraft similar to the mainland Shenzhou manned spacecraft, which was originally scheduled to be tested for the first time around August 2022, and after two successful tests, the third manned launch was carried out. Interesting and informative scientific content, please pay attention to the only WeChat public account: Interesting Exploration