Chandrayaan-3 Will Be A Game-Changer: Former ISRO Scientist Nambi Narayanan

Chandrayaan-3, India's third lunar mission will be a potential game-changer that will serve as an inspiration to the whole world, said former Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) scientist Nambi Narayanan on Thursday.

He said that the succession launch of Chandrayaan-3 will make India only the fourth nation to achieve this feat after the United States, China and the former Soviet Union.

''Chandrayaan-3 will definitely be a game changer for India and I hope it will be successful. India will become an inspiration to the entire world. Let's wait for the launch and pray for the best..." he told news agency PTI.

"Apart from boosting the economy and development in the space sector, it will also improve India's share from the present 2 per cent in the 600 billion-dollar industry," he added.

"When compared to other nations, our spending for such missions is a pittance," he noted.

Narayanan said we will have to wait till August 23 or 24 to know the success of the mission as the landing would take place on those dates.

He also pressed on the need for establishing something like an Asian Space Agency (ASA) along the lines of the European Space Agency (ESA), with or without China, for taking up such bigger space missions.

Chandrayaan-3 follows the 2019 Chandrayaan-2 mission where space scientists are aiming for a soft landing on the surface of the moon.

Chandrayan-2 managed to land on the Moon but failed to do a soft landing due to some software and mechanical issues. This time, the ISRO has adopted failure-based method to prevent a recurrence of a Chandrayaan-2-like situation, where the spacecraft crashed into the lunar surface.

In 2018, the Supreme Court had ordered a probe into the role of the Kerala police in the ISRO espionage case, in which 76-year-old Narayanan was an accused.

Narayanan who was arrested in the case had to spend close to two months in jail and later it was found by the CBI that the espionage case was a false one.

The espionage case, which hit the state in 1994, was related to allegations of transfer of certain space programmes to foreign countries by two scientists and four others, including through two Maldivian women.