Chandrayaan 3: Last 20 minutes of Vikram lander's journey to be most crucial

With less than 48 hours left for the Chandrayaan-3's scheduled soft-landing on the lunar surface, India will be witnessing the last most crucial 20 minutes on Wednesday. The mission, if successful, will lead India to become only the fourth country to achieve a soft landing on the Moon, joining the United States, Russia, and China, and emerge as a space power.

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According to reports citing experts, the last 20 minutes will be all about the spacecraft softly landing on the site. While ISRO's mission scientists will be programming the landing a day prior, the last few minutes will be an autonomous movement.

Chandrayaan 3 mission on schedule: ISRO

On Tuesday, the ISRO informed that the Chandrayaan-3 mission - which is scheduled for its soft-landing on the lunar surface on August 23 - is right on schedule. “Systems are undergoing regular checks, smooth sailing is continuing,” the space agency wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

The space agency also shared a video of images of the moon captured by the Lander Position Detection Camera (LPDC) from an altitude of about 70 km, the ISRO. “LPDC images assist the Lander Module in determining its position (latitude and longitude) by matching them against an onboard moon reference map,” it said.

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Chandrayaan 3 lunar landing likely to be postponed?

According to senior ISRO scientist, the national space agency will go ahead with the landing only if conditions on the day are “favourable”; or else a fresh attempt will be made on August 27.

“Two hours before Chandrayaan-3 lands on the Moon, we will take a decision on whether or not it will be appropriate to land it at that time based on the health of the lander module and the conditions on the Moon. In case, if any factor appears to be not favourable, then we will land the module on the Moon on August 27,” Nilesh M Desai, Director, Space Applications Centre, ISRO, told news agency ANI.