Chandrayaan-2 to be launched on July 22; ISRO confirms

New Delhi: India's ambitious second mission to the Moon Chandrayaan-2 will now lift off at 2.43 pm on July 22, space agency ISRO said on Thursday (July 18), three days after the launch was aborted due to a technical snag in its GSLV-Mk-III rocket.

Eariler, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) scientists had confirmed that the glitch has been rectified. However, news agency IANS quoted one of the scientists as saying that officials are looking at dates for the launch and may be somewhere between July 21 and 23.

The rocket GSLV-Mk III was supposed to liftoff at 2:51 am on Monday (July 15) with India's second moon mission spacecraft Chandrayaan-2. However, just an hour before liftoff, the mission had to be called off.

"A technical snag was observed in launch vehicle system at 1 hour before the launch. As a measure of abundant precaution, #Chandrayaan2 launch has been called off for today. Revised launch date will be announced later," ISRO tweeted and didn't elaborate further.

ISRO had earlier constituted a multidisciplinary expert committee to study the technical glitch in the GSLV-Mk III rocket.

IANS also quoted officials as saying that they were relieved by the fact that the glitch was identified ahead of the launch, thereby saving Rs 978 crore worth rocket and the spacecraft.

Just after the launch was called off, former ISRO chief K Madhavan Nair recalled that India's first mission to the Moon had experienced a similar problem shortly before the rocket could blast off.

But ISRO scientists found and rectified the error and the mission took off as planned, said Nair, the chairman of the space agency during Chandrayaan-1 launch in 2008.

Chandrayaan-1 made more than 3,400 orbits around the Moon during its operational life of 312 days and detected water in vapour form on the lunar surface.

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