India’s next moon mission will launch early Friday morning (July 14), and you may watch the historic motion live.
The robotic Chandrayaan 3 mission, which goals pull off India’s first-ever moon landing, is scheduled to launch atop an LVM3 rocket from Satish Dhawan Space Centre on Friday at 5:05 a.m. EDT (0905 GMT, or 2:35 p.m. local time).
Watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of the Indian Space Research Organisation, or directly via ISRO. Coverage is predicted to begin about an hour before liftoff.
Chandrayaan 3 consists of a lander and a rover, each of which carries a handful of scientific instruments. If all goes in line with plan, the duo will touch down softly near the moon’s south pole in late August, then study their environs for about one lunar day (roughly 14 Earth days).
With a successful touchdown, India would join a really exclusive club: So far, only the USA, the Soviet Union and China have successfully landed a spacecraft on the moon.
India has tried to achieve this once before, on the Chandrayaan 2 mission in September 2019. But that attempt ended with a crash into the lunar surface.
Chandrayaan 2 wasn’t a complete failure, nevertheless; the mission also featured an orbiter, which arrived safely and continues to review the moon today. (There isn’t any lunar orbiter on Chandrayaan 3.)
Chandrayaan 3 will probably be Friday’s second liftoff, if all goes to plan. SpaceX goals to launch 54 of its Starlink web satellites at 12:40 a.m. EDT (0440 GMT) from Florida on that very same morning. And California-based company Rocket Lab is planning a launch of its own from Recent Zealand on Friday afternoon.