Currently, the Chandrayaan-3 mission, launched by India last July, is orbiting the moon waiting to start the braking sequence that will take it to the south polar region. The chosen landing site is about 150 kilometers north of Bogulawsky Crater, where Russia planned to land its Luna-25 spacecraft in order to win this new space race. But on Sunday Moscow lost communications and its probe crashed into the satellite; a new demonstration of how complicated it is to land on the moon. So far, only the United States, the Soviet Union, and China have done so. No one has managed to do this near the pole, where there may be vast reserves of frozen water to allow for future human space missions.
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“We have nothing to worry about, but we have reasons to worry,” admits Anil Bhardwaj, director of the Indian Physical Research Laboratory, who has worked in the Asian country’s space program for almost 30 years, to EL PAÍS. “At the moment everything is going according to plan, our ship is in perfect condition and we hope to land around 6 p.m. Indian time on Wednesday.” [14.30 hora peninsular española]”, Add.
The moon landing will be broadcast live. The Indian space agency, the English acronym ISRO, has encouraged educational centers across the country to watch the event with all students. This mission is “a new chapter in India’s space odyssey” and realizes “the dreams and aspirations of all our citizens,” said the country’s President Narendra Modi in statements collected by Portal.
India is a rising space power and its probes have already made history. In 2009, Chandrayaan-1 discovered water ice at the moon’s poles. In 2019, the country sent Chandrayaan-2, an orbital probe and lander that would become the first manned spacecraft to land at the South Pole. A programming error led to the crash, but the orbiter is still in good service today. Their images have allowed Indian engineers to see the pole’s surface with a tremendous resolution of 30 centimeters per pixel, which in turn has allowed them to improve Chandrayaan-3’s technology and select a new landing spot that is free of dangerous ones There are craters or boulders. “This time we are much more confident that the area is safe,” admits Bhardwaj.
Chandrayaan-3 Mission:
Here are the pictures of
area on the other side of the moon
caught by the
Lander Hazard Detection and Avoidance Camera (LHDAC).Developed by ISRO, this camera helps to find a safe landing spot – free of boulders or deep ditches – during descent… pic.twitter.com/rwWhrNFhHB
– ISRO (@isro) August 21, 2023
Landing on the moon is a fiendish task because there is no air to stop it. Robot ships do not have much maneuverability beyond their automatic imaging and guidance systems. And the moon’s south pole is one of the most rugged and cratered. When something fails, the probability of failure is enormous.
The new Chandrayaan will seek to succeed where Russia, which dispatched its first lunar mission in 47 years, Japan, which recently lost the private Hakuto-R probe, and Israel, which planned to arrive ahead of India in April 2019, on Sunday failed. but also lost. In a few days, this space race will continue with a new attempt by Japan, in this case its space agency, to land in the equatorial zones with the SLIM mission.
moon sunrise
Chandrayaan-3 will make landfall just as dawn breaks on the moon. There the days last 14 earth days and the nights, so many others. 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, hence its official lifespan is 14 days of sunshine. But Bhardwaj does not rule out returning to his former life on the very first night. “We can only wait and see,” he admits.
The Chandrayaan-3 carries the Vikram Lander, a nearly two-ton spacecraft 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.
Craters on the moon captured by the Chandrayaan-3 lander’s position detection camera on August 19. ISRO
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.
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 Vikram. 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.
If Chandrayaan-3 succeeds, it will be a global milestone. “It will be the first on-site measurements from the south pole of the moon; all information will be completely new” and will be very useful for future missions in India and other countries, Bhardwaj points out.
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 carry an Indian-designed lander and a Japanese-designed rover. 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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