When will Chandrayaan-3 attempt soft- landing on Moon?

Chandrayaan-3 Mission by ISRO is at its final stage and in just a few days, the Indian spacecraft will make its first attempt to soft-land on the Moon. As per the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Chandrayaan-3 will make a soft landing on the Moon on 23 August (Wednesday) at around 5:45 PM (IST) in the evening. The Lander module of Chandrayaan-3, comprising Vikram lander and rover Pragyan will soft land on Moon where the speed will go down from 6000 km/hour to zero.

Launched on 14 July 2023, Chandrayaan-3 underwent more than five manoeuvres so far. Yesterday, the final deboosting operation of Chandrayaan-3 was carried out successfully.

Now, the powered descent is expected to start on August 23.

On Friday, Chandrayaan-3's Vikram lander underwent a crucial deboosting manoeuvre and descended to a slightly lower orbit, after successfully getting separated from the propulsion module the day before.

ISRO is bidding to make a successful soft landing on the moon, which will make India the fourth country in the world to achieve the feat after the United States, Russia, and China. Besides, India will become the first country to reach Moon's south polar region if the Chandrayaan-3 mission becomes successful.

Chandrayaan-3 is the ISRO's follow-up attempt after the Chandrayaan-2 mission faced challenges during its soft landing on the lunar surface in 2019 and was eventually deemed to have failed its core mission objectives.

Developed by ISRO, Chandrayaan-3 includes a lander module named Vikram, which means "valour" in Sanskrit, and a rover named Pragyan, Sanskrit for "wisdom".

The mission comes with a price tag of around ₹60live0 crore -- far lower than those of other countries, and a testament to India's frugal space engineering.

The rover has a mission life of one lunar day, or 14 Earth days.

ISRO chief S. Somanath has said his engineers carefully studied data from the last failed mission and tried their best to fix the glitches.

India's space programme has grown considerably in size and momentum since it first sent a probe to orbit the Moon in 2008.