Vikram lander.

NEW DELHI: After the Vikram lander setback last year, Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) is gearing up for the Chandrayaan-3 mission in the first half of next year.

Union minister for department of space Jitendra Singh, in a written reply to the Lok Sabha on Wednesday, said, “The tentative launch schedule for Chandrayaan-3 is (in) first half of 2021. Chandrayaan-3 mission has been configured based on the lessons learnt from Chandrayaan-2. The revised configuration takes care of the robustness in design, capacity enhancement for mission flexibility and at the same time retained the heritage of Chandrayaan-2 to the extent possible.”

The focus on robustness in design in the third lunar mission is key as Chandrayaan-2 mission received a setback in its last leg of its lunar journey when the lander crash landed in the south pole region of Moon on September 7 last year. Though all earlier operations like trans-lunar injection , lunar orbit insertion and orbiter-lander separation were successful, the lander failed to soft-land successfully and with it the Pragyan rover operation to scan the lunar surface could not be completed. However, the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter is fully functional and circling around the Moon's orbit, and will have a lifespan of seven years.

In an earlier reply to the House, the minister had said that Chandrayaan-3 mission would be economical as it would carry only a lander mission.

On the Gaganyaan project, Jitendra Singh told the House, “Hardware realisation has commenced for the ground test and first unmanned mission. The space flight training of four astronaut candidates commenced (in Russia). National collaboration for design, development and delivery of human-centric products such as crew medical kit, crew health monitoring system, emergency survival kit, dosimeters, earmuffs and fire suppression system has started.”

He said that a three-week training programme for the flight surgeon was completed at Isro with the participation of French space agency CNES. On the tests to be performed in space during the unmanned mission planned at the end of this year, Singh said four biological and two physical science-related microgravity experiments from academic institutions have been shortlisted for the mission.

