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Luna-Resource / Chandrayaan-2

In 2020, the Chandrayaan-2 mission deployed an orbiter but its lander and rover were destroyed when it plummeted to the surface, leaving a crater close to where the Chandrayaan-3 mission intended to land.

Chandrayaan-2, India’s second lunar mission, has three modules namely Orbiter, Lander (Vikram) & Rover (Pragyan). The Chandrayaan 2 orbiter is a box-shaped craft with an orbital mass of 2379 kg and solar arrays capable of generating 1000 W power. The orbiter communicates with the Indian Deep Space Network and the lander. The orbiter will have a scientific payload comprising a visible terrain mapping camera, a neutral mass spectrometer, a synthetic aperture radar, a near infrared spectrometer, a radio occultation experiment, a soft X-ray spectrometer and solar X-ray monitor.

The lander, named Vikram, has a mass of 1471 kg (including the rover), and can generate 650 W of solar power. The lander can communicate directly to the Indian Deep Space Network, the orbiter, and the rover. The lander will carry a camera, seismometer, thermal profiler, Langmuir probe, and a NASA-supplied laser retroreflector.

The rover, Pragyan (also Pragyaan), is a 6-wheeled vehicle with a mass of 27 kg that runs on 50 W of solar power and can travel up to 500 m at a speed of 1 cm per second. The rover communicates directly with the lander. the rover will hold cameras, alpha-proton X-ray spectrometer, and a laser-induced ablation spectroscopy experiment.

All the modules were getting ready for Chandrayaan-2 launch during the window of July 09, to July 16, 2019, with an expected Moon landing on September 06, 2019. It would cost about 10 billion rupees ($144m). The mission, if successful, would make India only the fourth country after the United States, Russia and China to perform a "soft" landing on the moon and put a rover on it. China successfully landed a lunar rover in January 2019. The Israeli spacecraft Beresheet failed and crashed onto the moon in April 2019.

The Orbiter and Lander modules would be interfaced mechanically and stacked together as an integrated module and accommodated inside the GSLV MK-III launch vehicle. The Rover is housed inside the Lander. After launch into earth bound orbit by GSLV MK-III, the integrated module would reach Moon orbit using Orbiter propulsion module. Subsequently, Lander would separate from the Orbiter and soft land at the predetermined site close to lunar South Pole. Further, the Rover would roll out for carrying out scientific experiments on the lunar surface. Instruments are also mounted on Lander and Orbiter for carrying out scientific experiments.

Chandrayaan-2 was originally planned as a cooperative Indian and Russian Luna-Resource/Chandrayaan-2 mission is to consist of a Indian ISRO developed lunar orbiting spacecraft, and a Russian Federal Space Agency developed lunar Lander spacecraft to deliver the fixed lunar station of 30-35 kilograms of Russia with up to 10 instruments possible including a 1 meter depth lunar drill and the small 15 kilogram powered Luna-Resource Roving Spacecraft of India to the lunar surface. Both the Lander and the Rover would have their own robotic arms capable of gathering samples for testing. The primary aim of the mission is to detect lunar water indications. Once trans-lunar injection of the Luna-Resource/Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft has taken place the orbiter and Lander would separate and place themselves into lunar orbit through separate operations.

India ’s orbiter and lunar rover would utilize a total of seven science payload packages with five for the lunar orbiter and two on the lunar rover. The mass of the Orbiter is 1,400 kilograms the Russian, Luna-Resource Lander with its various payloads is 1,250 kilograms for a total Chandrayaan-2 payload mass of 2,650 kilograms. It would be launched with the Russian supplied Luna-Resource Lander stage with its scientific packages perhaps numbering up to three in total.

The Chandrayaan-2 Lunar Resource Rover would have two scientific packages to lunar surface materials analysis. The two instruments are the:

1. The Laser induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS)

2. The Alpha Particle Induced X-ray Spectroscope (APIXS)

Chandrayaan-2 Luna-Orbiting-Resource spacecraft with it five scientific payloads packages are as follows:

1. The Terrain Mapping Camera-2 (TMC-2) to help develop three dimensional lunar maps on its geology and materials mineralogy.

2. The Neutral Mass Spectrometer (ChACE-2 for lunar exosphere studies.

3. The IR Imaging Spectrometer (IIRS) to map the lunar surface through a wide wavelength range mineral logy study along with its hydroxyl examination analysis.

4. The Large Area Soft X-ray Spectrometer (CLASS) with its Solar X-ray monitor (XSM) again for mapping the primary material elements on the lunar surface.

5. The L & S band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) that would be utilized to probe the depths of the surface several tens of meters looking for various materials such as water ice on the Lunar poles.

This Luna-Resource mission was initially expected to be launched in 2013 on the Indian GSLV mark-2 booster the un-successfully flown indigenous design tested in April 2010 or GSLV-3 mark-3 is also suggested as the booster to be used. The international payload launch would be from India ’s Satish Dhawan Space Center, Sriharikota. It was further suggested in March 2010 by Prime Minister Putin that Russia and India join capabilities to explore the moon as a continuation of the existing agreements for unmanned missions to the moon that would expire in 2017. The need to identify priority cooperative joint missions is also based on the five year planning process used by Roscosmos for 2011- 2015 as well as post 2015-2020.

The baseline mission objective of Chandrayaan-2 is to soft land at a suitable site on the lunar surface and carry out in-situ chemical analysis. Chandrayaan-2 is envisaged as a two module configuration comprising of Orbiter Craft module and Lander Craft module. Both the modules interfaces mechanically by a inter module adapter. Chandrayaan-2 is planned to be launched onboard GSLV MK II with a lift off mass of 2560 kgs and would carry two rovers each weighing 50 kgs. One Rover is developed by Russian Space Agency and the other at ISRO Satellite Centre.

The ambitious project was supposed to be a joint mission of India and Russia but it got stuck after the failed Phobos-Grunt mission of Russian Space Agency Roscosmos, after which India decided to develop its indigenous lander and rover. There was a review of all inter-planetary missions in Russia and Russian colleagues said that the mass of the lander would go up and they would have an experimental mission of the lander module in 2015 and they would like to take a full scientific mission in 2017. Russia also offered Indian rover to be tested subjected to availability of mass (during its experiments.

Preliminary studies for the landing site selection have been done and a possible list of payloads has been prepared. Design & configuration finalization is in progress. An integrated review of Chandrayaan-2, to assess the programmatic re-alignment, has been conducted at ISRO Head Quarters. The review recommended that India could realize the Lander module in a time frame of next few years. Consequent to the review, Advisory Committee on Space Science (ADCOS) has finalized the payloads to be accommodated on the Lander module. Mission configuration details are near finalization. Another review was conducted to finalize the specification of the payloads for Lander and Rover modules.

Consequent to the failure of the Russian-led interplanetary mission Phobos-Grunt, a sample return mission to Phobos (one of the moons of Mars), decisions have been taken by ROSCOSMOS to increase the reliability of their planetary missions. This would result in increase in the mass of the Moon Lander (planned for Chandrayaan-2). ROSCOSMOS suggested that ISRO may provide Indian Rover for launch scheduled in 2015 or in 2017, also indicating that the 2015 opportunity involves mass limitation for Rover and higher risk.

Since these inputs from Russian side called for a major programmatic re-alignment, an integrated programmatic review on Chandrayaan-2 (chaired by Prof U R Rao) was carried out to critically assess our capability to design and deploy a Landing craft in a short time frame. The integrated review of Chandrayaan-2, recommended that India could realize the Lander module in the next few years. Currently the spacecraft is being reconfigured for the proposed Indian Rover and Lander modules.

In May 2012, ISRO conducted a feasibility study on development of a lander and after this was completed, it found that it would be possible to develop a lander in India in 2-3 years time. By August 2013 ISRO planned to launch Chandrayaan-II with an indigenous rover and lander using GSLV by 2016 or 2017.

India decided to withdraw from cooperation in 2013, introducing Israeli technology alone. Based on the development of the landing cabin, an unrelated "initial" lunar probe launched by Israel in the United States failed to land on the moon in April 2019. India launched a bid to become a leading space power 22 July 2019, sending up a rocket to put a craft on the surface of the Moon in what it called a "historic day" for the nation. Chandrayaan-2 – or Moon Chariot 2 – took off on time at 2:43 pm (0913 GMT) from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on an island off the coast of Andhra Pradesh state.

After launch, "Moonboat No. 2" was all normal, and successively completed the orbital change from near-Earth orbit to the near-moon orbit, and the maneuvering derailment in the orbit of the near-month, during which all parameters were normal, and it was also heard. Two photos, one is the picture of the Earth photographed by "Moon Ship No. 2", one is the picture of the surface of the moon photographed, and the fifth and last change was successfully completed on Chandrayaan-2.

After a long flight of 46 days, on 07 September 2019 India's self-developed "Moon Ship 2" lunar probe tried to land at the moon's South Pole, but in the trajectory 2.1 km from the lunar surface, conact was suddenly lost. India’s bold mission to soft-land on moon suffered a setback during the wee hours on Saturday, with Chandrayaan-2’s ‘Vikram’ module losing communication with ground stations, just 2.1 km from the lunar surface during its final descent. “The Vikram Lander followed the planned descent trajectory from its orbit of 35 km to just below 2 km above the surface. All the systems and sensors of the Lander functioned excellently until this point and proved many new technologies such as variable thrust propulsion technology used in the Lander,” ISRO said in an update. The Indian Space Research Organization suddenly fell into a tense and long wait, and tried to get in touch with Chandrayaan-2, but unfortunately still did not get news about Chandrayaan-2. Finally the Indian officials reluctantly announced that Chandrayaan-2 failed to land on the moon, and India had missed the fourth moon landing country. Indian Prime Minister Modi was still on the scene to re-assure scientists, saying that "there are always ups and downs in life, and the country is proud of you!"

The Indian Space Research Organisation said 07 September 2019 that till date 90 to 95 per cent of the Chandrayaan-2 mission objectives had been accomplished and it would continue contributing to Lunar science despite the loss of communication with the Lander. The space agency also said the precise launch and mission management had ensured a long life of almost seven years instead of the planned one year for the orbiter. The success criteria was defined for each and every phase of the mission and till date 90 to 95 per cent of the mission’s objectives have been accomplished and it would continue contributing to Lunar science , notwithstanding the loss of communication with the Lander, it said. The successful landing would have made India the fourth country after Russia, the US and China to achieve a soft landing on the moon, also the first to launch amission to the unexplored south pole of the Moon.

Pointing out that the orbiter has already been placed in its intended orbit around the Moon, ISRO said, “It shall enrich our understanding of the moons evolution and mapping of the minerals and water molecules in the Polar Regions, using its eight state-of-the-art scientific instruments. The orbiter camera is the highest resolution camera (0.3m) in any lunar mission so far and shall provide high resolution images which will be immensely useful to the global scientific community,” it said, adding that the precise launch and mission management has ensured a long life of almost 7 years instead of the planned one year.