Chandrayaan-3, India's ambitious moon mission, to be launched on July 14

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Thursday announced that its lunar mission Chandrayaan-3 will be launched on July 14 from the space port at Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh.

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) earlier announced that it had successfully integrated the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft with the launch vehicle, Launch Vehicle Mark-III (LVM3), at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh’s Sriharikota.

Chandrayaan-3 is a follow-on mission to Chandrayaan-2 to demonstrate end-to-end capability in safe landing and roving on the lunar surface.

Built at a cost of around ₹615 crore, India's third lunar mission is aimed at achieving a successful landing of the lander on the moon's surface, followed by the deployment of a rover to carry out a range of experiments.

It has a lander and rover configuration. The propulsion module will carry the lander and rover configuration till the 100 km lunar orbit. It has a Spectro-Polarimetry of Habitable Planet Earth payload to study the spectral and polarimetric measurements of Earth from lunar orbit.

The Chandrayaan-3 will be India’s second attempt to make a spacecraft land on the Moon. The Chandrayaan-2 mission, launched on July 22, 2019, had partially failed after its lander and rover crashed on the Moon during the early hours of September 6.

The United States, the Soviet Union and China are the only three nations which have successfully landed their spacecraft on the moon.