With India’s first lander-rover mission — Chandrayaan - 2 — scheduled for launch on July 22, former Chairman of Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) K. Radhakrishnan said space scientists will be looking forward to a safe and soft touchdown for the lander named ‘Vikram’. Unlike the earlier mission to the moon in 2008, when the spacecraft orbited the moon at a distance of 100 km, Chandrayaan – 2 envisages a landing. He said the spacecraft will move at a space of 1.6 km per second in the orbit of moon, which is almost 6,000 km per hour. About fifty years ago , when Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin first landed on the moon, they could have used their ‘cognitive’ capability. The global space enterprise was worth $360 billion and India had made its own niche in the field consistently.

Source: The Hindu July 19, 2019 19:13 UTC