Chandrayaan-3 Design

Chandrayaan-3 consists of three modules with a combined launch mass of 3,900 kg:

Module	Mass	Role
Propulsion module	2,148 kg	Carried the lander from Earth orbit to 100 km lunar orbit; hosts the SHAPE payload
Vikram lander	1,726 kg (incl. rover)	Soft landing and surface science for one lunar day
Pragyan rover	26 kg	Surface mobility and in-situ elemental analysis

Upgrades after Chandrayaan-2

ISRO adopted a "failure-based design" approach — engineering for what could go wrong rather than assuming success. Key changes to the lander:

Four throttleable engines instead of five (the central fixed-thrust engine was removed).
Stronger landing legs tolerating higher touchdown velocities.
A Laser Doppler Velocimeter (LDV) for precise velocity measurement during descent.
Larger fuel reserve and solar panels on more surfaces.
An expanded target landing area of 4 km × 2.4 km, with authority for the guidance software to handle larger dispersions.

Lander: RAMBHA-LP (plasma), ChaSTE (thermal profile), ILSA (seismometry), plus NASA's Laser Retroreflector Array.
Rover: APXS and LIBS spectrometers for elemental analysis.

Propulsion module: SHAPE — Spectro-polarimetry of Habitable Planet Earth, observing Earth from lunar orbit as an exoplanet analogue.

All lander and rover instruments performed successfully at Shiv Shakti Point in August–September 2023 — see the mission overview for results.