BENGALURU: India on Wednesday scripted history in golden letters after recording the first-ever soft landing at the Moon’s south pole. With this landing, exactly at 6.04 pm, India also became only the fourth country to have soft-landed on the lunar surface after the US, the erstwhile Soviet Union, and China. Chandrayaan-3’s record-setting success comes four days after Russia’s lunar mission Luna-25 crashed on August 19, just two days before its scheduled touchdown near the lunar south pole attempting to be the first to do so. That record now lies with Chandrayaan-3 of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
The Chandrayaan-3’s lander Vikram began its powered descent at 5.47 pm from an altitude of 30 km. It completed all four landing phases of rough braking, altitude hold, fine braking and terminal descent in an error-free manner, as planned and sticking to their respective deadlines.
The powered descent of Vikram Lander lasted 17 minutes filled with tension as it was during this phase that Chandrayaan-2 had lost its lander in September 2019. “Chandrayaan-3 chose a relatively flat region on the lunar surface,” ISRO wrote on micro-blogging site X (formerly Twitter). It touched down between Manzinus C and Simpelius N craters near the lunar south pole.
Agony and ecstasy
The entire community of ISRO scientists, including some former ISRO heads who had gathered at the Mission Operations Complex (MOX) at ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) in Bengaluru, exulted in jubilation as Vikram landed.
“Sir, we have achieved a soft landing on the Moon. India is on the Moon,” said an overwhelmed ISRO chairman S Somanath, seconds after lander Vikram touched down on the Moon while addressing Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who virtually joined to witness the historic moment from South Africa where he is attending the BRICS Summit.
The thunderous applause echoed from inside the MOX and merged with the resounding applause at the press enclave at ISTRAC premises amid loud cheers of Bharat Mata ki Jai and Vande Mataram.
The scientists inside MOX, who had watched the tense moments of ‘terror’ of the lander’s power descent after the last command from the Earth station at 5.47 pm, broke out into thunderous applause. It was a complete meltdown of emotions, perseverance, a lot of hard work and celebrations.
“It was a flawless mission,” said Somnath while describing the mission so far until the soft landing was achieved. He described it as “an incremental progress” while crediting the preceding mission, Chandrayaan-2, which failed to achieve a successful soft-landing due to an anomaly in the thrusters while attempting to land on September 7, 2019, leading to its crash.
Chandrayaan-3 is an improvement on Chandrayaan-2 while its objectives remain the same. “It was not an easy task in the last four years. There was a lot of agony and learning from Chandrayaan-2, which helped us in perfecting the methodology for soft-landing. It was a flawless landing. The velocity (of the lander) was reduced to less than two metres per second (during the powered descent),” he said.
Somanath named and invited the scientists behind Chandrayaan-3 — project director P Veeramuthuvel, mission operation director M Srikanth, associate project director K Kalpana, and U R Rao Satellite Centre director M Sankaran — to address the media.
Why south pole
Several missions from various countries, including India, Russia, Japan, and Israel have attempted landing near the lunar south pole but failed.
The significance of the lunar south pole is that it holds promise for setting up future human bases. While the region has been screened from orbit by various orbiting missions, including Chandrayaan-2, which continues to be in a lunar orbit, none has been able to land to conduct on-site experiments and studies of the lunar environment at and around the Moon’s south pole. The region is understood to hold abundant water ice and mineral resources that can sustain human bases in the future.
Vikram will deploy its rover Pragyaan to conduct on-site studies. Somanath said Pragyaan will be deployed from the lander in the “next few hours or even a day, looking at the surface conditions. It will operate on the lunar surface for 14 Earth days and gather valuable scientific data”, which would be relayed back to the Deep Space Network centre at Byalalu near Bengaluru for analysis.
The lander’s mission is planned to be over 14 days (one lunar day), during which the lander’s three payloads and the rover’s two payloads will be active to conduct the studies of the lunar environment. Explaining the various components used in the Moon mission, he said all of them were developed in the country. He added that the lander does have some instruments provided by some countries to conduct tests on the Moon's surface.
Beginning of multiple space explorations
ISRO chief Somanath said Chandrayaan-3’s success means a lot to ISRO and marks the beginning of multiple space explorations starting with ‘Aditya L1’ to study the corona of the Sun early next month. ISRO aims to explore Mars, Venus and other planets and asteroids, he added
5-watt signal amplifier
Rover’s desi cameras
The Pragyaan rover has two cameras which would be its eyes compared to foreign space agencies that use expensive cameras. The software in the rover has been developed by a Noida-based start-up, Omnipresent Robot Technologies. The images captured by the rover would generate a 3-D map of the lunar landscape. It also has a spectrometer to determine the chemical composition of the surface.
Nationwide contributions to Chandrayaan-3