India's Moon lander to launch Sunday!
 

Hello All,

India's first Moon landing mission is scheduled to begin this Sunday (see: https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/07/...ked-for-launch/ ), when a GSLV Mk.3 will--if all goes well--lift off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, carrying the Chandrayaan 2 spacecraft. The probe consists of three modules--an orbiter, a lander, and a rover. The mission's energy-saving (and payload mass-increasing) lunar transfer is similar to that of Israel's Beresheet ( https://spaceflightnow.com/tag/beresheet/ ) lander:

The triple-barreled GSLV Mk.3 launch vehicle will inject Chandrayaan 2 into a low Earth orbit, whose apogee will be raised gradually by brief burns until the apogee is raised to the Moon's distance, at which point the spacecraft will brake into a lunar orbit. After a period in lunar orbit, the lander and its rover will begin the descent to touchdown, which is scheduled to occur on September 6 (any of you who are ham radio operators can monitor Chandrayaan 2's transmissions using a directional antenna, as many hams did during the Apollo lunar missions).