India’s Chandrayaan spacecraft has entered the moons orbit on Saturday ahead of the countrys second attempted lunar landing . The mission comes with a price tag of . million far smaller than those of other countries and a testament to Indias frugal space engineering .
If the rest of the current mission goes to plan the mission will safely touch down near the moons littleexplored south pole between August and September . India is also working to boost its two per cent share of the global commercial space market by sending private payloads into orbit for a fraction of the cost of competitors .
Only Russia the United States and China have previously achieved a controlled landing on the lunar surface . India became the first Asian nation to put a satellite into orbit around Mars and three years later the ISRO launched satellites in a single mission .
The Gaganyaan Skycraft programme is slated to launch a manned mission into Earths orbit by next year . ISRO chief S. Somanath has said his engineers carefully studied data from the last failed mission and tried their best to fix the glitches in the previous failed mission to fix their own data from last failed space programme .
The Indian rocket used is much less powerful than the Apollo missions of the s and s which arrived in a matter of days which arrived within a few weeks . The probe orbited the earth five or six times elliptically to gain speed before being sent on a month .
The rover has a mission life of one lunar days. The probe has a total of about three months. The rover will explore the moon. It has a minimum of about five years. The mission. The lander. to be launched in a month.
