The Vikram lander landed on the peninsula at 14:34 shortly after 18:00 Indian time today after performing a fully automatic braking maneuver and approach to its target, presenting a major technological challenge. India is the fourth country to successfully land on the moon and the first to land on the moon’s hostile South Pole. “We made the soft landing. “India is on the moon,” announced Shri S. Somanath, head of India’s space agency.
“This achievement is not just for India,” President Narendra Modi said via video link from South Africa, “it belongs to all of humanity.” “This mission will help other lunar missions from other countries. We can all strive to reach the moon and beyond,” he added. A crowded control room cheered with applause and smiles as the Vikram module arrived at its destination, failing a single failure throughout the complex landing sequence.
To date, only the United States, Soviet Union and China have successfully landed on the Moon, but none have succeeded on the satellite’s South Pole, where there may be vast reserves of frozen water that could support future inhabited bases and manned missions to the moon, to Mars and beyond.
“The landing is extremely complex, that’s why we call it the 20 minutes of terror,” Santosh Vadawale, scientist of the Chandrayaan-3 mission, told EL PAÍS before the successful landing.
The most critical moments begin when the Vikram module has reached the point closest to the moon within its elliptical orbit. At that time he was traveling at more than 6,000 kilometers per hour.
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The ship fired its missiles to slow down while tilting from the horizontal position to the fully vertical position with its legs down, requiring complicated synchronization of the guidance and propulsion systems. At the same time, the Vikram tracked its speed and position using its own sensors, making sure it reached the designated landing zone, not far from Bogulawsky Crater, where Russia attempted to land. In the final part of the process, the spacecraft identified potential hazards such as craters and boulders and found a safe spot for the soft landing, which was performed at a speed similar to that of a slow-walking human. All automatically and without the possibility of intervention from Earth.
The main goal of Chandrayaan-3, which will cost around 70 million euros, is to demonstrate the safe and soft landing in the south polar region of the moon. From a scientific point of view, the main goal is to understand the thermal and physical properties of the lunar surface at the landing site, as well as its chemical properties.
The moon was imaged by the Chandrayaan-3 lander’s camera on Aug 20. ISRO
“The main scientific contribution of this mission will be completely new observations of the chemical, thermal and physical properties of the lunar surface in the southern polar region,” summarizes Vadawale.
“Incredible. Congratulations to the Indian Space Agency, to Chandrayaan-3 and to all the people of India,” said the Director General of the European Space Agency (ESA), Josef Aschbacher, on his social networks. “What an opportunity to demonstrate new technologies and achieve the first soft landing on another celestial body in India,” added the head of ESA, whose network of tracking antennas has been collaborating with the mission.
India arrives at the Selenite South Pole a few days after the Luna 25 probe disaster, which Russia hoped to be the first to reach that region of the satellite. But on Sunday, the Mission Control Center lost communications with the spacecraft and it crashed. Indeed, in a short space of time, the moon has become a graveyard for space missions. Japan failed this year, Israel in 2019, and soon after India itself, hopelessly losing the lander of the Chandrayaan-2 mission.
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The engineers at the Indian Space Agency have learned from this failure. They have made many technical improvements to Chandrayaan-3 and conducted extensive tests on Earth, which has made them “very confident” that they will be successful, Vadawale explains.
The Chandrayaan-3 landed at the landing point exactly at dawn. On the moon, the days last 14 earth days and the nights many more. By sunset, temperatures can plummet to 200 degrees below zero, perhaps too much for the probes to survive unless they have a heating system — the one on the ill-fated Luna-25 was fueled by radioactive uranium. The Chandrayaan has no heat generator other than its solar panels, so its official lifetime is 14 days of sunshine, although mission officials believe it could be longer. “We can only wait and see,” Anil Bhardwaj, director of India’s Physics Research Laboratory, who has worked on the Asian country’s space program for nearly 30 years, told the newspaper.
History was made#Chandrayaan3The successful landing means that India is now the fourth country to land a spacecraft softly on the moon, and we are now the ONLY country to successfully land near the moon’s south pole! 🇮🇳🌖 #ISRO pic.twitter.com/1D8Bdo4r8F
—ISRO Spaceflight (@ISROSpaceflight) August 23, 2023
The Vikram Lander is a nearly two-ton device named after Vikram Sarabhai, the creator of India’s space program in 1947, the year India gained independence from the UK.
The spacecraft will be operational about ten minutes after landing on the moon, when all the dust it raises has settled. After checking that everything is working, a ramp is set up in about four hours, down which Pragyan – wisdom in Sanskrit – descends, a six-wheeled vehicle weighing almost 30 kilos that can roll a few hundred meters around the starting point. Landing.
This rover carries two scientific instruments on board to analyze the chemical composition of the terrain. One of them fires a powerful beam of laser light to break the bonds and detect up to 16 different elements, including oxygen and hydrogen that make up water.
Moment of take-off of the “Chandrayaan-2” from Sriharikota (India). The country is attempting to become the fourth country in the world to land a device on the moon. The mission is a new example of India’s thriving space program as it is being developed almost entirely in that country, which sent an orbital spacecraft, Chandrayaan 1, to the moon back in 2008. Indian Space Research Organization
Vikram carries four other scientific instruments. One of them is a probe that is supposed to measure the temperature of the subsoil up to a depth of ten centimetres. Your data is key to finding out if frozen water may be present and how changes in outside temperature affect it.
A reflector from the US space agency NASA is also on board the lander. It is a further development of the instruments of the Apollo space probe, which carried the first astronauts to the moon in the late 1960s. With this instrument, a laser beam can be fired from the earth, which receives the reflection and thus measures the distance with great precision.
India is already preparing another turn. His space agency is developing the LUCAX mission in collaboration with the Japanese agency JAXA. This new mission will have on board an Indian-developed lunar lander and a Japanese-developed mobile vehicle. Its target is even more hostile than the current one: the eternal shadowy areas near the South Pole, where sunlight never reaches and where it is more likely that there is a large amount of ice. The same area full of craters shaped like black holes is the declared goal of the United States, which aims to bring the first non-white women and men there in December 2025.
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