Introduction
How The Chandrayaan 3 Launched? Chandrayaan 3 India’s mission to the Moon is successful because it took the precise path to get there. Any deviation from this path could have resulted in the spacecraft either crashing into the moon or being lost in space forever. So, what exactly is this path? Well, it’s not a straight line because in that case the rocket would have a hard time escaping the Earth‘s gravity, and to do that we would have to launch it at an extremely high speed and need a lot of fuel. Unfortunately, this is not possible even for our largest and most powerful rockets, so what do we do instead?
How the Chandrayaan 3 launched?
ISRO scientists made smart use of the Earth’s motion to provide the spacecraft with a natural boost. The Earth rotates about its axis from west to east at a staggering speed of 1670 kilometers per hour, so if we launch the rocket towards the east, it will get a big push from the Earth’s rotational motion. Also, the Earth revolves around the Sun at an insanely high speed of 107,000 kilometers per hour. If a spacecraft is aimed in the same direction Earth is already going, we will get another big push. So, this is how the rocket is launched: a first boost pushes the spacecraft in the eastward direction, and then when the spacecraft is headed in the same direction as Earth’s orbital motion around the Sun, the rocket gives it another boost, helping it escape the Earth’s atmosphere. This is how the Chandrayaan 3 launched.
How it works?
Now will the rocket escape Earth’s gravity and keep going? Not quite. Because it continues to be pulled down by gravity, will it descend back to the Earth then? Again, no, because there is another force countering the effect of gravity. What’s that force? It’s coming from the momentum that the spacecraft picked up from the rockets pushing it in another direction. A constant tug of war takes place between the spacecraft’s tendency to move away from the earth and the force of gravity pulling it back. At some point both these forces are perfectly balanced, and then without any fuel power, the satellite starts revolving around the Earth on its own in a fixed path in its orbit. The next task is to break free from the Earth’s pool. For that, rockets are fired again when the spacecraft is close to the Earth; this increases the speed, and the spacecraft goes into a bigger elliptical orbit. The process is repeated five times. After the fifth boost, the spacecraft’s orbit is significantly increased, bringing it closer to the Moon. At this point, it is captured by the moon’s gravity, and then the spacecraft starts orbiting the moon in a large elliptical path. This time, the orbit is decreased gradually by firing rockets in the opposite direction. Again, we repeat this process five times until the orbit is close enough to the moon. At this point, the Lander separates from the spacecraft and initiates the soft-landing procedure, and finally, Chandrayaan reaches the Moon. That’s how the Chandrayaan 3 launched by ISRO, by using Earth’s motion to its advantage and taking this peculiar orbital path, was one of the most economical missions to the Moon.