India's Flagship Lunar Mission Chandrayaan 3: Will it Brake or Break?

foreign Scott Manley here on Friday morning Indian space research organization launched chandrayan 3 on its mission to the moon and this was a big event the live stream on YouTube had like 8 million people watching it there is a huge amount of Interest national pride just straight up excitement for this Mission which will hopefully land a spacecraft on the moon and this is of course a follow-up to chandrayaan 2 which unfortunately failed to complete its landing on the moon and crashed for well complicated reasons which have never quite been uh released to the public the launch vehicle was the lvm3 formerly known as the geostationary launch vehicle Mark III uh this is the largest launch vehicle that India has it has two large three-segment solid rocket Motors called the s-200s those both light at t0 the core stage is powered by a pair of vcus engines burning dmh and dinitrogen tetroxide and those don't actually light until about two minutes into flight just before the solid rocket motor separate finally there is a third stage which is fully cryogenic using a hydrogen and oxygen this of course is great for getting those high performance boosts into geostationary orbit and that's what was used to carry the spacecraft into its initial transfer orbit which is a very similar in terms of altitude to a geostationary transfer orbit but in this case it was inclined at a higher inclination because it's going to the Moon rather than GTO so once in that orbit the chandrayan spacecraft was deployed and to be clear this is a multi-component spacecraft because this is a very complicated Mission but yet it was deployed into this orbit and now over the next few weeks it's going to make a series of maneuver to raise its orbit out up towards the Moon it will eventually get captured by the lunar sphere influence of the lunar of gravity and from there it will lower itself down into a low lunar orbit and finally it will deploy the Vikram Lander which will hopefully perform a soft controlled descent to the lunar surface enabling its instruments to study the surface of the Moon and also the deployment of a small Rover which should be able to perform its own independent study for up to a couple of weeks until the Sun finally sets and after that the vehicles will be without power and they will get very cold and they will probably not survive the lunar night but it would be a nice bonus if they did so if this is successful it would make India the fourth country to successfully soft land on the surface of the Moon it wouldn't be the first time they landed the moon because the very first chandrayaan spacecraft went into lunar orbit and performed a bunch of remote sensing but it also included a an impact probe a probe which was going to be dropped this would descend towards the surface and I'm sorry to say but the real thing hit a little bit harder and probably isn't in as few pieces as this animation would suggest I mean that's what the laws of physics tells us and then of course in 2019 there was chandrayan2 this was a much more complicated Mission it actually included an Arbiter which had an onboard orbital high resolution camera which has been able to survey the lunar surface at the highest resolution of any camera in lunar orbit and this has been a pretty successful Mission over the last few years but it also included the the Lander and this Lander was supposed to be the highlight of the mission they had a lot of important people at the launch Center during this landing and it performed pretty well during the early steps of the The Descent unfortunately when the fine breaking phase began the vehicle somehow ended up upside down at least according to the Telemetry we're not really clear if this was the actual attitude but it's seems like a pretty it's pretty likely the vehicle ended up falling towards the surface and impacted at speeds of about an order of 100 meters per second or so but even with that knowledge there were a lot of people who really wanted it to survive you know for for reasons of national pride it's totally understandable and they hung on to hope that it had somehow made it to the surface and it was just like on its side it's a you know antenna wasn't pointing at the Earth but yeah eventually it was found that there was a big debris field where it was supposed to be and unfortunately we never got the proper full Rapport about what actually happened to you know that resulted in this crash we had a few statements to the Press about things perhaps over performing but we never got a complete and unambiguous explanation for why the spacecraft had performed so well early on and then decided to lose attitude control right at the end but no with chandrayan 3 on the way we got a few more clues in Preston statements recently as I understand it now what happened was that during the early part of The Descent they were decelerating slightly higher than normal and this meant that there was an error slowly building up as to where the impact point would be and when it finally came out of this course breaking phase and decided to start trimming its trajectory it realized that it was way too short for its Target and it wasn't sure how to actually make it to that Target and ended up having a bunch of conflicting requirements because it wanted to make that very small Target but it couldn't make that very small Target and then some other issues got in the way I would love to see the complete report so I could break this down for you but I guess the most important thing is the engineers and scientists that have been working on Chandra N3 have been privy to the information and and have made changes they've understood what went wrong in the software one thing that they're doing is they are expanding the range over which the Lander is allowed to land so if it does end up coming up short it can be a little more cool with it they've uncapped some of the rotation limits which are also apparently contributed it's not clear why but there have been physical changes to the land or Hardware the most obvious thing is it now only has four engines it no longer has a single Central engine now the original chandrayan would land on that single Central engine but no it has four actually needs two of them to complete the landing because of the increased Mass the larger propellant tank and that larger tank is really obvious when you put these two spacecrafts side by side so presumably that's going to allow for some extra sensors I know there's going to be a laser Doppler velocity sensor that's going to be used for landing I also understand organically carrying more solar cells for you know unusual attitudes they might end up with on the surface The Landing legs are going to be a whole lot lot stronger you can see the difference in the thickness of the landing pads between these two spacecraft so that if it does come down a bit hard it has a better chance of surviving and hopefully around August 23rd we should find out if all these changes have worked when it is going to make its Landing attempt once again the spacecraft is targeting a landing site that is far south close to the lunar South Pole I think the latitude is about 73 degrees south in terms of instruments the Lander carries a seismometer a thermal probe and a plasma measuring system it also carries a passive lunar retro reflector array which has been provided by NASA you know this is a classic passive instrument where you shoot a laser at this Target on the moon and it reflects you back and you get very accurate distance measurements which allows you to do you know some signs but the real reason this is here of course is because it then makes it a partnership with NASA which means the NASA's deep space Network can be used to help communicate with the spacecraft in deep space the Rover carries a pair of instruments which are designed to examine rocks and minerals close up you've got an alpha particle x-ray spectrometer where you basically hit a target with a alpha particles and it gives off X-rays and you can figure out what elements are in there and there's a laser-induced breakdown spectroscope where you basically hit a target with lasers and it vaporizes it and the color of light that comes off lets you understand the chemical makeup of the materials again I'm sure that once it gets there the spacecraft will generate useful and interesting science but I think the thing that really sort of uh excited me has been just watching the population of India like all these people come out and express such support like turning up to watch this launch in droves I it just made me excited for it I love this photo of this sand sculpture that somebody put together to Tribute to the launch although I'm confused as to why the your official eyesro account decided to post a bunch of pictures from the wrong launch the lettering on the boosters is in the wrong place and if you look at the core of the rocket there is a flag that doesn't exist on the photographs only one of the four photos in this post is actually off the correct rocket and by the way if you think the rocket looks a little short and fat so once again the third bite has done its job yeah I like the fact that the Roman Engineers called it the fat boy if you watch the full live stream they actually have a great section showing how they assemble the rocket on the pad they use these two large three-segment solid rocker Motors and it's great because you can see them putting the sections together with the O-rings and the bolts and you can see the channel down the middle India is heavily invested in solid rocket Motors and they build some of the largest solid rocket Motors in the world I also like the fact that they showed the installation of the igniter at the very front of the rocket this is a pyrotechnic device that sits inside that channel and when they light the engines that's the first thing that lights it blows hot gas down that channel in the middle lighting the rest off the solid rocket motor so the the GSL V3 sorry the lvm 3 is what's going to be used to launch India's gaganyan which is going to be their crew spacecraft and I don't know when that's likely to fly but when it does it'll be a short you know independent orbital uh you know Mission this is going to be distinct from India's recent agreement with the USA to let astronauts Indian astronauts fly to the International Space Station that will almost certainly be on dragon or maybe Starliner but for now the flagship of India's space flight program is chandrayaan 3 on its way to the moon it's already made successful orbit raising Burns and we expect to be in orbit in a few weeks and I believe the current date for The Landing is expected to be August 23rd and well I will be paying attention and hoping for the best I'm Scott Manley fly safe [Music] [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Scott Manley

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Length: 11min 28sec (688 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 15 2023