Chandrayaan performs evasive manoeuvre

Bengaluru: India's Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft performed an evasive manoeuvre to avoid collision with NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), according to ISRO.

A very close conjunction between Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter (CH2O) and LRO of NASA was expected to occur on October 20 this year at 05:45 UTC (11:15 am IST) near the Lunar North pole, the Bengaluru-headquartered space agency said in a statement.

Over a span of one week prior to the conjunction, analyses by both ISRO and JPL/NASA consistently showed that the radial separation between the two spacecraft would be less than 100 metres and the closest approach distance would be only about three km at the time of closest approach. Both the agencies deemed that the situation warranted a collision avoidance manoeuvre (CAM) to mitigate the close approach risk, and it was mutually agreed that CH2O would undergo the CAM. The manoeuvre was scheduled on October 18. It was designed to ensure a sufficiently large radial separation at the next closest conjunction between the two spacecraft. The CAM was executed nominally at 14:52 UTC (8:22 pm IST), on October 18. After orbit determination of CH2O with post-manoeuvre tracking data, it was reconfirmed that there would be no further close conjunctions with LRO in the near future with the achieved orbit, ISRO said.

It may be noted that like CH2O, LRO orbits the Moon in a nearly polar orbit and hence, both the spacecraft come close to each other over the Lunar poles.