The spacecraft has to glide through a tricky dance of gravity, orbits, and finally land safely. People in the space business call it the ‘seven minutes of terror,’ when the spacecraft is on its own and the engineers, and scientists are mere spectators like all of us.
In the long journey of a spacecraft to another celestial body, there are several critical moments. Of them all, the most heart-pounding is when it makes the final journey to land. In those last minutes, everything hangs in the balance.
The spacecraft has to glide through a tricky dance of gravity, orbits, and finally land safely. People in the space business call it the ‘seven minutes of terror,’ when the spacecraft is on its own and the engineers, and scientists are mere spectators like all of us. The Indian space agency came face to face with it in 2019, during Chandrayaan-2.
