India Gearing Up for Second Moon Mission in 2018
Moon Express
In 2013, China landed a rover called Yutu on the moon. Since then, there have been no manned or unmanned moon landings.
But India is soon going to join the ranks of the moon landers
The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) plans to land its very first lunar rover by the end of March 2018. The project is called the Chandrayaan-2 mission. Chandrayaan means “moon vehicle.”
This is not ISRO’s first journey toward the moon
ISRO began its journey toward the moon in 2008 when Chandrayaan-1 made it into lunar orbit. With this, India became the fourth country to place a flag on the moon after the Soviet Union, the United States and Japan.
For the Chandrayaan-2 moon mission, ISRO is preparing three crewless vehicles: an orbiter craft that will hover above the moon’s surface, a lunar rover, and a lander craft to safely set the rover on the moon’s surface.
ISRO will complete this ambitious project on a shoestring budget of only $93 million.
The Chandrayaan-2 mission is just one of the ISRO’s planned projects. The organization is also working on “Aditya,” a mission that aims to study the sun, and “XPoSat” (the X-ray Polarimeter Satellite), which is a five-year satellite mission to learn more about cosmic radiation.
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