Chandrayaan 3 launched this month is on its path to the moon and is expected to make a good landing on the moon in August. ISRO is keeping its fingers crossed as its earlier lunar mission Chandrayaan 2 launched on July 22, 2019, failed due to a last-minute technical glitch.
Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Andhra Pradesh consisted of a lander, a lunar orbiter, and the Pragyaan rover especially designed to study the variations in the composition of the lunar surface. The spacecraft was also supposed to detect and find the location of the water where it is in abundance.
The launch was successful but things went wrong when it reached the orbit of the moon on August 20. The craft started to position itself to make possible the safe landing for Vikram Lander that was supposed to study the surface of the moon.
It was scheduled that the rover and the lander will land on the South Polar Region of the Moon at 70 degrees South latitude. But the plans went kaput when both the rover Pragyaan and lander Vikram made a crash landing on the surface of the moon in the early morning hours of September 7.
The failure analysis report handed to ISRO indicated that the crash occurred due to a software glitch. Incidentally, just before the crash, the contact between the Vikram lander and ISRO was lost. At that time Vikram lander was 0.335 km from the moon’s surface.
It was scheduled to make a soft landing but instead crashed because instead of tilting 55 degrees as planned it tilted 410 degrees.
The moment the lander tilted in the wrong direction, things went out of the hands of the scientists. It was expected that slowly the velocity of the lander will slow down in four phases but since the agency had lost all contact with the Vikram lander the control was gone and in the end, the lander crashed on the moon’s surface.