ISRO chairman S Somanath has said that the lander of Chandrayaan-3, Vikram, will be able to make a soft-landing on the Moon’s surface on August 23 even if all the sensors and two of its engines do not work.
“If everything fails, if all the sensors fail, nothing works, still it (Vikram) will make a landing. That’s how it has been designed — provided that the propulsion system works well. We have also made sure that if two of the engines (in Vikram) don’t work this time also, it will still be able to land,” Somanath said during a talk on ‘Chandrayaan-3: Bharat’s Pride Space Mission’.
“We have also made sure that if two of the engines don’t work this time also, it will still be able to land. So the whole design has been made to make sure that it should be able to handle many failures, provided the algorithms work properly,” the ISRO chief added.
The Chandrayaan-3 consists of a lander module (LM), a propulsion module (PM) and a rover.
The mission took off atop an LVM-3 rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota at 2.35 PM IST on July 14. While on August 6, the spacecraft entered a lunar orbit.
