Chandrayaan-2

Launch Date	March 2018
Launch Site	Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota, India
Destination	Earth's Moon
Type	Orbiter, Lander, Rover
Status	In Development
Nation	India
Alternate Names

Goals

Demonstrate the ability to soft-land on the Moon and operate a robotic rover on the surface. Scientific goals include studies of lunar topography, mineralogy, elemental abundance, the lunar exosphere and signatures of water ice.

Accomplishments

This mission is in development.

Key Dates

March 2018: Launch

Spacecraft

Launch Vehicle: GSLV

Spacecraft Mass:

Orbiter: 3,087 pounds (1,400 kilograms)

Lander: 2,800 pounds (1,250 kilograms)

Rover: 64 pounds (20 kilograms)

Spacecraft Instruments:

Orbiter: visible camera, a mass spectrometer, a synthetic aperture radar, a near infrared spectrometer, a radio occultation experiment, an X-ray spectrometer and solar monitor.

Lander: camera, seismometer, thermal profiler, and Langmuir probe.

Rover: cameras, alpha-proton X-ray spectrometer, and a laser-induced ablation spectroscopy experiment.

Additional Resources

National Space Science Data Center Master Catalog: Chandrayaan-2

Selected References

Siddiqi, Asif A. Deep Space Chronicle: A Chronology of Deep Space and Planetary Probes 1958-2000, NASA, 2002.