India Is on the Moon

Achieving a soft landing close to the south polar region of the moon a few minutes past 6pm on August 23, India became the fourth country to land on the lunar surface and the first to make a soft landing near the lunar south pole. Scientists and officials of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) could not have hoped for a smoother landing as they witnessed the historic event from the Mission Operations Complex (MOX), ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC), in north Bengaluru.

The live telecast of the Chandrayaan-3 landing broke NASA’s live stream viewership record even before the landing module began its powered descent, as a nation nervously sat glued to its screens. As the lander made it through the rough braking phase, gradually reducing its velocity and altitude as expected to arrive at about 7.4km from the moon’s surface before sailing through the brief attitude hold phase, cheers erupted. Three minutes into the fine braking phase, the module began its vertical descent from about 800m from the surface and hovered directly above the site before finally landing softly. The landing velocity was reported to be ideal–that is, under two metres per second.

ISRO chief S Somanath congratulated the mission team on the success. The lander’s health will be assessed and the rover will roll out of the lander in the next few hours, he said. The rover, named Pragyan, weighs 26kg and carries two payloads, the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer to study the chemical and mineralogical composition of the lunar surface, and the Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscope to determine the elemental composition. It will trundle over the surface, venturing up to 500m from the landing site, through the next 14 days and will leave a symbolic imprint of the Ashoka chakra on the moon’s surface. The lander Vikram weighs 1752kg and is powered by four 800 Newton bi-propellant throttleable engines; it carries several payloads to measure plasma density near the lunar surface, its thermal properties and the seismic activity of the site. It also carries the Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA) by NASA, which will aid in lunar surface navigation for future missions to the moon.

Chandrayaan-3 is a follow-on mission to Chandrayaan-2 with an objective to demonstrate landing capability. In 2019, Chandrayaan-2’s Vikram lander narrowly missed a soft landing, crashing into it after a glitch during the final landing phase. ISRO made significant improvements to Chandrayaan-3, “building for failure” to ensure it got it right this time. The spacecraft was launched on board Launch Vehicle Mark-3 (LVM3) on July 14 at 2.35 PM from Sriharikota and slingshot into lunar orbit.

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V Shoba

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