India became the first country to place a space probe on the moon’s surface near the south pole on Wednesday, with the successful landing of the Chandrayaan-3 unmanned spacecraft.
Four years after a failed attempt, India has now joined the United States, Russia and China as the countries that have reached the surface of the moon. India was the first to land at the South Pole.
Chandrayaan-3, which launched on July 14, landed near the south pole of the moon at around 1:30 pm Lisbon time.
The interest in this area is related to supposed reserves of ice, which could support human outposts and propel spacecraft on missions to Mars and other distant destinations.
The south pole of the moon is also the target of future American manned missions, NASA’s Artemis program.
India, the fourth country in the world to have a presence on the moon, tried to reach the south pole of the moon in 2019 with the spacecraft “Chandrayaan-2”, but lost communication before it touched the lunar surface.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi called today “a historic day” when India became the first country to place a probe on the lunar surface near the south pole. “It is a historic day for the Indian space sector,” Modi wrote on social network X (formerly Twitter).
Consisting of a 1.7-ton autonomous lander, a 2.1-ton propulsion module and a 26-kilogram robotic vehicle, the Chandrayaan-3 mission aims to develop and test new technologies needed for interplanetary missions.
The lander’s payload includes instruments to measure thermal conductivity and temperature, to measure seismicity around the landing site, to estimate plasma density and its variations, as well as a series of passive laser retroreflectors from NASA for research into the laser range on the lunar surface .
Specifically, the robotic vehicle is equipped with an alpha particle X-ray spectrometer (APXS) and a laser-induced decomposition spectroscope (LIBS) to determine the elemental composition in the vicinity of the landing site.
Chandrayaan means ‘moon ship’ in Sanskrit. The program was developed by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).
The successful Indian mission came just days after the crash of Luna-25, Russia’s first probe to the moon since 1976.
Luna-25 crashed into the moon on Saturday after failing to enter the required orbit to land in its target zone, also at the South Pole.
The south pole of the moon is where the United States aims to place the first female astronaut and the first black astronaut in December 2025, under the new Artemis lunar program.
Only the United States had astronauts on the lunar surface between 1969 and 1972, all of them male, under the Apollo program.
Source: DN
