Ground controllers in Bangalore on Saturday activated a thruster rocket aboard Chandrayaan-3 and successfully inserted the spacecraft into a lunar orbit, a key milestone in the mission aimed at a soft-landing on the moon.

The thruster rocket burned for 1,835 seconds, starting at 7.12pm IST, slowing down the spacecraft’s speed just enough to allow it to enter the first of a series of planned lunar orbits. The Indian Space Research Organisation said the manoeuvre resulted in a 164km-by-18,074km orbit.

Isro launched Chandrayaan-3 on July 16 for a planned lunar landing around August 23. “The health of Chandrayaan-3 is normal,” Isro said in a tweet.

Throughout the mission, the health of the spacecraft is being continuously monitored from mission control at the Isro Telemetry Tracking and Command Network in Bangalore and the Deep Space Network antenna near Bangalore with support from the European Space Agency and the US Jet Propulsion Laboratory deep space antenna.

In the coming days, Isro engineers will activate more rocket burns to place the spacecraft in lower and lower orbits after which Chandrayaan-3’s lander-rover will separate from the propulsion module and attempt to achieve a soft-landing.

The lander and rover in Chandrayaan-3 — Isro’s third lunar mission — carry scientific instruments for studies to explore lunar geology, the chemical and mineral makeup of the lunar surface and rocks in an unexplored region of the moon about 650km from the moon’s south pole.

Chandrayaan-1, launched in 2008, was a lunar orbiter whose onboard instruments had helped detect signatures of water molecules on the moon. Chandrayaan-2, which had carried a lander-rover, had made it all the way to the moon in September 2019, but things went wrong during
its final descent, causing its lunar module to crash on the moon.

Isro engineers and mission designers have loaded Chandrayaan-3 with extra fuel, earmarked a 40-fold larger landing area than for its predecessor, and designed the spacecraft for myriad possible failures to achieve the soft-landing.

Only Russia, the US and China have so far soft-landed spacecraft on the moon. Spacecraft from Israel and Japan have crashed on the moon.