Bengaluru: India’s ambitious second lunar mission Chandrayaan-2 has successfully raised its orbit around the Earth for the second time early on Friday, taking the spacecraft one step closer to the Moon, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said.
The 15-minute Earth-bound manoeuvre was carried out at 1.08 am using the spacecraft’s on-board propulsion system, the space agency said in a statement here.
According to ISRO officials, Earth bound orbit is a phase during which the spacecraft will remain in the Earth’s sphere of influence.
With the latest manoeuvre, Chandrayaan-2 has been pushed to an orbit with a perigee — nearest point to Earth — of 251 kilometres (km) and an apogee — farthest point to the Earth — of 54,829 km, it said.
On the day of launch on July 22, the spacecraft was injected into an elliptical Earth orbit with a perigee of 169.7 km and an apogee of 45,475 km and this was further raised in the first manoeuvre on Wednesday.
ISRO said all the parameters of the spacecraft were normal and the third orbit raising manoeuvre will be performed on July 29.
In a giant leap for the country’s ambitious low-cost space programme, ISRO’s most powerful three-stage rocket GSLV-MkIII-M1 had launched the spacecraft into the orbit of the Earth on July 22 from the spaceport of Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh. (PTI)
