Chandrayaan-3’s likely landing sites finalised - Hindustan Times

The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) has finalised the coordinates of three possible landing sites for its third lunar mission – Chandrayaan-3 – expected to be launched later this year.

All the probable landing sites are on the moon’s south polar region on the side facing earth, senior scientists from the space agency said on Tuesday.

The criteria for selecting the landing sites for Chandrayaan-3 – a follow-on mission to Chandrayaan-2 which is meant to demonstrate end-to-end capability in safe landing and roving on the lunar surface – included local and global slope, illumination from the sun, radio communication with earth, and crater and boulder sizes, a space scientist said, asking not to be named.

The moon’s southern polar region is of particular interest to scientists because there’s a possibility of finding water ice.

Chandrayaan-2 was successfully launched and inserted into lunar orbit in 2019, but its lander crash-landed on the moon’s surface when it deviated from its trajectory while attempting to land on September 6, 2019, due to a software glitch.

To select suitable sites using coarse and medium resolution data, the local slope should be less than 10 degrees, the global slope should tend towards the equator, more than 90% of the site area should be sunlit for 10-11 days, boulder size should not be more than 2m, and there should be minimum crater and boulder distribution in the area, said a scientist from Isro’s Space Application Centre, who is associated with the mission.