‘Reviewed challenges and worked on Chandrayaan-3’

S. Somnath, Chairman of ISRO, says lessons have been learned from the previous mission and improvements made; Chandrayaan-3 to study the lunar atmosphere, surface in greater detail.

In an exclusive interview with NewsX, S. Somnath, the Chairman of ISRO, revealed crucial details about the highly anticipated launch of Chandrayaan-3. He discussed the lessons learned from the previous mission, the improvements made, and the ambitious scientific experiments planned for the upcoming lunar mission. The interview highlighted ISRO’s determination to overcome challenges and achieve success, showcasing their unwavering commitment to pushing the boundaries of space exploration. Excerpts:
Q: Big announcements have come from ISRO about the launch of Chandrayaan-3 on 14 July. Can you provide some details about the big launch that has been announced by ISRO?
A: See, the launch is on 14 July in the afternoon. We had a window from 12-19 July. So, the current schedule of work is leading to 14 July. It was originally on 13 July. Then, we are hoping the lift-off takes place on the scheduled time. Then we have a possibility of landing on the first opportunity. That is by the beginning of 23 August. Maybe that also has a window. So that’s what we are expecting.
Q. Sir, there were a lot of expectations last time. We have seen the mission failed to a large extent. But then this time around, what are the corrections, what are the lessons that have been learned?
A: First thing I want to tell you, the last time the mission didn’t fail to a large extent. It succeeded to a large extent. The orbiter is still functioning. And because the orbiter is functioning, we are better equipped this time to land perfectly. Because I’ll tell you one example. The orbiter has a high-resolution camera. It has taken the entire moon pictures at high resolution, like 28-centimeter resolution. And this image is fully available here. Using that image, now we are able to understand which is a better place to land and we have widened the landing area. This is a big advantage of having Chandrayaan-2 success. There were so many instruments on board Chandrayaan-2 orbiter, all of them are working beautifully. It has done remote sensing images of moon and found out lot of new scientific findings. The only thing, we learned a lot of things during landing. So, we say we learnt from failure. So, significant part of the landing process was successful or it happened, I would not use the word success, it happened as we expected. But some part of the landing process did not happen as we expected. So, we found out what exactly went wrong and we did those corrections this time. And again, hoping that this time, it will function very well. See, in space work, we know that we are not controlling anything. We are planning and loading everything on board, expecting certain nominal things to happen. But things can go wrong. Some instruments can fail, some unforeseen things can happen, and it may go to a path which is never expected in our calculation or simulation. But we ask this question many times here. What can go wrong? How it can be different? And we address all the thinking that our human mind within our community can bring out and we tested them. And we found out that it will work.
Q: I know you have a busy schedule. What are the main experiments that we are looking at? What are the achievables in brief?
A: See, we are looking at studying the surface, the moon, the goliath in greater detail. We are looking at the elemental composition, how it is constructed. We are also putting a probe 10 cm deep into it to understand the thermal conductivity, which is an important attribute on the science part of it. We are looking at the close atmosphere very near to the surface, which we call a “thin atmosphere”, which is more like a “charged atmosphere”, and we are measuring it. So, we are measuring the seismic activity of the moon. We are putting an instrument on the surface, which has a very high sensitivity acceleration measurement, so it can see the internal processes happening. So, these are the essential measurements that we are doing.