Why In News ?

• The Prime Minister announced that August 23rd will be celebrated as the National Space Day.It was on this day that the ISRO Chandrayaan mission made history by landing near the south pole of the moon.
• The Prime Minister also announced that the site where Vikram Lander and Rover Pragyan landed on the Lunar surface will be named as Shiva Shakti point.
• Another site on the Moon where the Chandrayaan 2 lander crash landed will be known as Tiranga Point.
• India is the fourth country to soft-land a spacecraft on the Moon and the first to do so in the region of the Moon's south pole.(USA, Russia and China)

Static

• Chandrayaan-3 was launched on July 14, 2023, from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre.
• The LVM3 M4 launcher was used to launch this mission.
• The scheduled landing site for the lander is ~690S, the South Pole.
• The lander (Vikram) and rover payload (Pragyan) of Chandrayaan-3 are similar to those of the Chandrayaan-2 mission.
• A new experiment called Spectro-Polarimetry of Habitable Planet Earth (SHAPE) has been carried out in the propulsion module of Chandrayaan-3.
• SHAPE aims to search for potentially habitable minor planets by analysing the reflected light.
• Chandrayaan-3 is expected to operate on the lunar surface for at least one lunar day (14 Earth days).

The objectives of Chandrayaan-3 are:

• Safe and Soft Landing
• Rover Roving on Moon Surface
• In-situ Scientific Experiments.