After tasting success with low-budget Mars orbiter Mission (MoM), Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is now embarking on a ₹1,000 crore Chandrayaan-2 — the Indian mission to land on the Moon. Chandrayaan-2 will be launched on GSLV Mk-3 M1 on July 15th at 2:51 AM in the morning, landing on the Moon is scheduled on September 6th. The Composite Earth Stack (CES) comprising of Orbiter, Lander and Rover will be injected into a 170 x 38000 km highly eccentric orbit 15 minutes after launch.
Within 16 days after launch, the Orbiter will perform four orbit raising manoeuvres to raise the apogee to 141000 km. The fifth manoeuvre will put the spacecraft into a Trans Lunar Injection (TLI) trajectory, where it will take five days to travel to the Moon until it is captured by the Moon’s influence. When the spacecraft is captured by the Moon’s influence a retro burn is done to form a orbit around the Moon. Subsequently four manoeuvres are done to lower the orbit to 100 km circular orbit.
After that, the lander will separate from the Orbiter and perform a burn to lower the orbit to 30 x 100 km. After four days of health checks, the landing manoeuvre is done to soft-land near the South Pole of the Moon, where it will take 15 minutes from the start of the burn until the lander lands on the surface of the Moon. ISRO calls it the most crucial part of the mission and has never undertaken such a complex mission, for the first time ISRO will be using throttle-able liquid engines to perform this manoeuvre.
After the Lander soft lands on the surface of the moon, the door that houses the rover inside will open, and it will take about 4 hours for the rover to descend from the lander onto the lunar surface. The rover will move at a speed of 1 cm/sec, and will function for one lunar day and move for about 500 meters, which is 14 days on Earth.