After India’s Chandrayaan 2 lander unfortunately failed to land on the Moon in 2019 during its final mission phase, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) undertook building a repeat mission with Chandrayaan 3. It is currently undergoing final tests and is slated for launch in 2023.

To increase the chances of sticking the landing this time around, ISRO has made several upgrades to the Chandrayaan-2-like lander such as software improvements, strengthened legs, a couple of new sensors, and better power and communication systems.

The mission will also have an orbiter to propel the lander to the Moon as well as to relay communications during and after landing. It will also host the SHAPE Earth-observing experiment, which ISRO shared at COSPAR 2022. The Chandrayaan 2 orbiter will serve as a backup (and secondary) relay provider. Being a repeat of the Chandrayaan 2 landing attempt, Chandrayaan 3’s landing site is expected to be in a near-polar lunar highland too. The mission will last a maximum of one lunar day i.e. 14 Earth days.

The lander

The lander will carry payloads similar to Chandrayaan 2. It will insert a thermal probe about 10 centimeters into the lunar soil to measure its thermal properties and learn about the Moon’s interior. A seismometer onboard will detect moonquakes, like NASA’s Apollo missions did. If a strong enough moonquake occurs during the mission, it could provide additional clues about the Moon’s interior, particularly its core.

Vikram will also carry a Langmuir probe to determine the amount, distribution and properties of hot, ionized particles on the lunar surface created by the solar wind, and a radio occultation experiment that will measure electron density in the Moon’s thin but persistent atmosphere. NASA is contributing a retroreflector, an upgraded version of the ones left on the Moon by Apollo missions, which scientists will bounce laser pulses off to better understand the gravitational dynamics of the Earth-Moon system.

The rover

The six-wheeled Chandrayaan 3 rover, the same design as the one on Chandrayaan 2, will study the geology of the landing region. An X-ray spectrometer will study what the region’s rocks and lunar soil are made of. A high-power laser will shoot and vaporize target material and analyze radiation emitted from it to determine the material’s composition using a (different) spectrometer. Both spectrometers are expected to find pristine materials from the ancient lunar crust.

ISRO’s lunar soil simulant

For testing the Chandrayaan landers and rovers, ISRO developed a lunar soil simulant called LSS-ISAC-1. To make the simulant, ISRO sourced naturally occurring anorthosite rocks fragments from the Sittampundi Anorthosite Complex in southern India, which aids the simulant’s fidelity. The bulk chemistry, mineralogy and physical & mechanical properties of the final LSS-ISAC-1 simulant are similar to Apollo 16 highland soil samples, in part because Chandrayaan 2’s target landing site was in a lunar highland too.

Communications support

ISRO and NASA signed an agreement in February 2022 to use the latter’s Deep Space Network (DSN) to support communications for Chandrayaan 3. It was shared as but a small note in the February monthly summary of India’s Department of Space. ESA will also provide backup communications via their Estrack network for Chandrayaan 3, as one of the first benefits of a broader technical support agreement signed in July 2021 between ESA and ISRO.

ISRO uses its own Indian Deep Space Network as a primary means for communicating with its planetary spacecraft but partners with other space agencies for backup and secondary options. India’s Chandrayaan 1 orbiter had DSN support too.

ISRO’s lack of mission information

All of this information has been put together by following minor developments and tracking multiple sources consistently for over a year. For such a critical mission, it’s frustrating as an Indian to see ISRO not even have a one-pager on their website about Chandrayaan 3, and no official mechanism to provide major updates.

If anything, ISRO has continued to withhold any substantial information on the mission. When Twitter user @frustratedpluto submitted several questions to ISRO under the Indian Right to Information Act in September 2021, nearly all the responses read as follows.

The information sought is exempted from disclosure under Section-8(1)(a) of RTI Act as it would prejudicially affect the scientific, technical and strategic interest of the state/country.

ISRO, a tax-payer-funded civilian space agency, has been outright refusing to provide the public any asked-for substantial information on Chandrayaan 3’s configuration, tests, and more. Even the purely scientific question of “Provide me with the location of the NASA’s LRA payload onboard the Vikram lander on Chandrayaan 2” was given the same response. Indians who have submitted questions to ISRO before are unfortunately familiar with this dreaded statement. It almost makes one think of Chandrayaan 3 as a cold-war-era lunar defense mission rather than a robotic explorer.

For an organization that’s supposed to help inculcate scientific thinking and aspiration in hundreds of millions of Indians, this is a dreadful state of affairs.

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