07-10-2019, 01:26 AM
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Master Modeler
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Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Fairbanks, Alaska
Posts: 6,507
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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). |