Chandrayaan-3 launch: What are the different kinds of moon missions?

There has been a resurgence of interest in exploring the Moon over the past 15 years. Flybys, orbiters, impact missions, landers, rovers, and human missions are the six main categories of lunar missions. What you need to know about them is as follows. 

 

The Chandrayaan-3 project is India's second attempt at a soft lunar landing and third lunar mission overall. It is one of many space missions planned to visit the planet, along with NASA's Artemis II and Russia's Luna 25 mission.

There has been a resurgence of interest in exploring the Moon over the past 15 years. Since all that could be done on the Moon with the technology available at the time had been done, there was a full hiatus in sending spacecraft there after the final Apollo mission in the early 1970s. Although some modification was made in the 1990s, Chandrayaan-1's 2008 discovery of water on the lunar surface provided the major impetus.

The various lunar missions that have been launched thus far are listed here.

*Flybys: 

These are the missions when the spacecraft came within striking distance of the Moon but failed to enter an orbit around it. These either had the objective of studying the Moon at a distance or were traveling to another planetary body or a deep space exploration target when they just so happened to pass by the celestial object. Pioneer 3 and 4 by the United States and Luna 3 by the Soviet Union at the time are two early instances of flyby missions.

*Orbiters:

 These were satellites that were intended to enter a lunar orbit and conduct in-depth investigations of the Moon's atmosphere and surface. Chandrayaan-1 from India and the other 46 moon missions from other nations were all orbiters. The most popular method for examining a planetary body is through orbiter missions. Only the Moon, Mars, and Venus have been accessible for landings thus far. Orbiter or flyby missions have been used to study all other planetary bodies. Another component of the Chandrayaan-2 mission was an orbiter, which is still in use and is now orbiting the Moon at a height of about 100 kilometers.

*Impact Mission: 

They are a development of Orbiter missions. One or more of the spacecraft's instruments crash-land on the moon's surface as the main spaceship continues to orbit the moon. Even though they are destroyed upon impact, they nonetheless transmit some insightful data about the Moon. Similar preparations were made for the Moon Impact Probe, or MIP, another equipment on Chandrayaan-1, to crash land on the Moon's surface. The MIP data, according to ISRO, contained more proof of the existence of water on the Moon, but these results could not be reported due to calibration issues.

*Landers:

These missions require a soft Moon landing by the spacecraft. Compared to Orbiter missions, these are more challenging. In actuality, all 11 of the initial attempts at lander missions had failed. On January 31, 1966, the then-USSR's Luna 9 spacecraft made the first landing on the moon. Additionally, it sent the first image of the Moon's surface.

*Rovers:

These are an extension of the lander missions. The lander spacecraft, since they are hefty and have to stand on legs, remain motionless after landing. The instruments on board can conduct out observations and collect data from close quarters but cannot come in contact with the Moon’s surface or move about. Rovers are designed to circumvent this challenge. Rovers are special wheeled payloads on the lander that can detach themselves from the spacecraft and move around on the moon’s surface, collecting very useful information that instruments within the lander would not be able to obtain. The rover onboard Vikram lander in the Chandrayaan-2 mission was called Pragyaan

*Human missions:

These entail the landing of astronauts on the moon’s surface. So far only NASA of the United States has been able to land human beings on the moon. So far, six teams of two astronauts each have landed on the moon, all between 1969 and 1972. After that, no attempt has been made to land on the Moon. But with NASA’s Artemis III, currently slated for 2025, humanity is expected to once again to the lunar surface in more than 50 years