(New Delhi) The silence of the Indian mobile robot on a mission to the moon does not worry the head of the Indian space agency, who told the press on Thursday night that the machine “did what was expected”. by him.
Posted at 7:00 am.
Pragyan (“wisdom” in Sanskrit), a six-wheeled solar-powered vehicle, conducted a scientific mission to the south polar region of the moon before shutting down for the duration of the lunar night, about two weeks.
The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) planned to extend the mobile robot’s mission by reactivating it as soon as light returned to the lunar surface, but the machine still did not respond.
“It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t wake up because he has done what was expected of him,” ISRO chief S. Somnath was quoted as saying by news agency PTI.
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“No signal has been received from them yet,” the space agency said.
According to the Indian space agency, the vehicle’s mission was to survey the still poorly mapped region of the lunar south pole and transmit images and scientific data for two weeks.
The Indian mobile robot thereby confirmed the presence of sulfur, aluminum, calcium, iron, chromium and titanium on the lunar surface, ISRO said in a press release. Other measurements also showed the presence of manganese, silicon and oxygen.
On August 23, India became the first country to land a spacecraft, Chandrayaan-3, near the south pole of the Moon, joining the very select group of countries that have successfully carried out a controlled lunar landing.
Previously, only the USA, the Soviet Union and China had managed to successfully carry out such an operation.
A few days before the Indian spacecraft landed, the Russian Luna-25 probe crashed in the same area.
In 2014, India became the first Asian country to launch a spacecraft into orbit around the planet Mars.
A three-day manned mission around the Earth is scheduled to be launched by next year.