new delhi with just days left for the scheduled launch of indias third moon mission any day after july 12 isro said on wednesday that the encapsulated assembly containing chandrayaan3 is mated with the lvm3 rocketisro is looking at launching the lunarcraft in the july 1219 window and will make a second attempt at softlanding on the south pole side of moon which if successful will put india in the elite club of three nations us russia and china with moonlanding capability if the spacecraft is launched successfully next week it will travel towards the moon for over a month covering a distance of about 384 lakh km and will attempt a safe landing on the south pole side around august 23chandrayaan3 is a followon mission to chandrayaan2 unlike its predecessor which carried an orbiter along with vikram lander and pragyan rover chandrayaan3 is a composite of three modules propulsion lander and rover the total weight of the spacecraft is 3900 kg which is a tad lower than the total carrying capacity of lvm3 the propulsion module weighs 2148 kg and the lander 1752 kg including the rover incidentally the chandrayaan2 payload weighed about 38 tonnes with the orbiter weighing 2379 kgafter its failed landing attempt on september 6 2019 isro has since carried out several changes on the lander for chandrayaan3 mission this time vikram will have stronger legs than in its previous version to enable withstanding landing at greater velocities than earlier while isro has also made several other changes learning from the failures of the chandrayaan2 mission the propulsion module has spectropolarimetry of habitable planet earth shape payload to study the spectral and polari metric measurements of earth from the lunar orbit lander payloads are chandras surface thermophysical experiment chaste to measure the thermal conductivity and temperature instrument for lunar seismic activity ilsa for measuring the seismicity around the landing site langmuir probe lp to estimate the plasma density and its variations and a passive laser retroreflector array from nasa is accommodated for lunar laser ranging studiesthe rover payloads are alpha particle xray spectrometer and laser induced breakdown spectroscope for deriving the elemental composition in the vicinity of the landing site the main function of the propulsion module is to carry the lander module from launch vehicle injection till the final lunar 100 km circular polar orbit and separate the lander from the propulsion apart from this the propulsion module also has one scientific payload as a value addition that will be operated post separation of the lander