The countdown has started ahead of the launch of India’s ambitious Chandrayaan-2 moon mission on 15 July at 2:51am in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, reports India Today.
According to the Indian Space Research Organisation everything has been checked and is going according to plan.
The aim of the mission, using India's strongest GSLV MKIII launcher, is to land a robotic rover on the moon near the South Pole.
The latest mission is intended for various experiments to study extent and significance of the presence of water on the Moon, as confirmed by the Chandrayaan-1 mission.
The current Chandrayaan-2 has a lander, one rover and an Orbiter.
Once it’s launched, the Chandrayaan-2 will take five days to reach the Moon's radius, after which its orbiter will start rotating around it. It will be 100 km away from the surface of the Moon.
It is estimated that the lander rover will make its touchdown on the Moon's surface on 6 September.
This is the first time India is trying to land a robotic rover on Moon, and if successful, the country will become the fourth in the world to make a soft landing on the Moon and put a rover on it.
Over the past few years, the ISRO has been carrying out record breaking, low cost space missions, especially its unmanned Mars launch in 2014; the Mars Orbiter Mission or Mangalyaan was carried out at a cost of $74 million.
India’s premier space agency recently boasted ambitious plans of building a space station within a decade. The space station would take around five to seven years to be built, after the ISRO’s manned mission has been completed in 2022.
Once successful, India would join the select league of nations, which include Russia, the US and China, that have their own space stations.