Chandrayaan 3: Vikram lander journey to be most vital in Last 20 minutes

With less than 48 hours left for the Chandrayaan-3's scheduled soft-landing on the lunar surface, India will be witnessing the last most crucial 20 minutes on Wednesday.

The mission, if successful, will lead India to become only the fourth country to achieve a soft landing on the Moon, joining the United States, Russia, and China, and emerge as a space power.

According to reports citing experts, the last 20 minutes will be all about the spacecraft softly landing on the site. While ISRO's mission scientists will be programming the landing a day prior, the last few minutes will be an autonomous movement.

On Tuesday, the ISRO informed that the Chandrayaan-3 mission which is scheduled for its soft landing on the lunar surface on August 23 is right on schedule. Systems are undergoing regular checks, smooth sailing is continuing, the space agency wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

The space agency also shared a video of images of the moon captured by the Lander Position Detection Camera from an altitude of about 70 km, the ISRO. LPDC images assist the Lander Module in determining its position (latitude and longitude) by matching them against an onboard moon reference map.