The following article was originally published on July 14, 2019, and was republished on September 6.
Chandrayaan 2 is India’s first space mission of its kind. In this mission, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will attempt to soft-land a spacecraft on the Moon. If successful, India will go down in history as the fourth country to achieve a lunar landing, following the US, the USSR and China.
The launch had originally been slated for 2:51 am on July 15 but it was called off 56 minutes and 24 seconds before liftoff after engineers detected a “technical snag”, in ISRO’s words, in the GSLV Mk III’s launcher’s cryogenic upper stage. They spent the following week narrowing down on the exact problem: a pressure drop in a container of helium adjacent to a tank that held the supercold cryogenic fuel. Then, they performed an additional launch rehearsal to check if everything was okay, and successfully launched it at 2:43 pm on July 22.
Getting there
When Chandrayaan 2 was approved in 2007, the lander – the colloquial name of the module that will descend onto the lunar surface – was to be built by Russia while India was to be responsible for the orbiter and the rover. However, technical difficulties on the Russian side precipitated delays and eventually Russia backed out, unable to meet the revised mission deadline of 2015. At that point, India decided to undertake the lander engineering and launch as well, making the mission a fully indigenous endeavour.