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NEW DELHI: Just days before the Chandrayaan-3 launch, Isro chairman S Somanath has given three main reasons that led to the crashlanding of the Vikram lander on September 6, 2019 just minutes before the touchdown. The Isro chief said the “five engines of the lander generating higher thrust, limitation of the software to detect errors and the small landing site” were the three primary causes for the crashlanding of the lander. “In a nutshell, we can say the (our) ability to handle parameter variation or dispersion was very limited,” he said. Speaking on the sidelines of the India Space Congress,...

LIVE! ISRO Chandrayaan Lunar Lander + Rover Launch This one is set to launch in 3 hours as of this posting.

The country's latest lunar mission, Chandrayaan-2, which means "moon vehicle" in Sanskrit, took off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center at Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh state at 2:43 p.m., Monday local time (5:13 am ET). The launch was originally scheduled for July 15, but was abruptly called off just 56 minutes before lift-off due to a "technical snag." India is now on the way to becoming the fourth country -- in addition to United States, China and the former Soviet Union -- to make a soft-landing on the lunar surface. The Chandrayaan-2, which weighs 3.8 tons and carries 13 payloads,...

NEW DELHI — India's only satellite orbiting the moon came close to failure after overheating but scientists improvised to save it and have achieved more than 90 percent of the mission's objectives, an official said Friday. The launch of Chandrayaan-1 in October 2008 put India in an elite group to have lunar missions along with the U.S., Russia, the European Space Agency, Japan and China. But on May 16, the satellite lost a critical instrument called the star sensor, the Indian Space Research Organization's chief Madhavan Nair told reporters. The sensor helps the satellite stay oriented so its cameras and...

Bangalore, Dec 25 (PTI) The Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), one of the 11 payloads on board India's Chandrayaan-I spacecraft, has taken composite image of the Orientale Basin region of the moon providing new information, officials said. Different wavelengths of light in the image captured by M3 during the commissioning phase of Chandrayaan-I as the spacecraft orbited the moon at an altitude of 100 km, provided new information about the region, located on the moon's western limb, they said. M3 is from Brown University and Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the United States. "The Moon Mineralogy Mapper provides us with compositional information...

A lunar probe from India's first unmanned moon mission Chandrayaan-1 has landed on the moon and started sending back its first images. The Moon Impactor Probe (MIP), painted on both sides with the Indian flag, detached itself from the spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 about 100km from the moon's surface and successfully crash-landed on the south pole of the moon at  3.01pm GMT, officials at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said. India's space programme began in 1962 and the MIP is the first Indian built object to reach the surface of the moon.