Face of Nation : In what will be another major milestone for India’s Chandrayaan-2 mission, the landing module (lander Vikram and rover Pragyan) will separate from the orbiter on Monday (September 2) or early Tuesday.
Although Isro has officially announced that separation would happen on September 2, as of Friday, the space agency’s plans show that the landing module separation is scheduled for 12.10am Tuesday.
“Generally, the timing for manoeuvre isn’t finalised until the day of the operation. We have estimates and sometimes a manoeuvre can be carried out a few hours before our first estimate and sometimes it may be a few hours after our first estimate,” one scientist justified.
Right now, Chandrayaan-2 is an integrated spacecraft comprising the orbiter on which the lander module is attached. While preparations for the separation has been going on at Isro for at least three days now, with the mission control finalising the sequence of events, the separation itself will take only a fraction of a second.
After successful manoeuvres on August 30 and September 1, the integrated spacecraft has reached an orbit ideal for separation. A senior scientist overseeing Chandrayaan-2 mission, said that once it is in the right orbit, the commands will be sent, and in a matter of less than a second Vikram would have separated from the orbiter.
“It will all be very very quick, the process is similar to how a satellite separates from the launch vehicle,” Isro chairman K Sivan told
