Indian Space Mission Chandrayaan-3 On The Moon

India is the first country in the world to land on the South Pole of the Moon. The Chandrayaan-3 space station managed to soft-land the Vikram descent module on the little-studied South Pole of Earth’s natural satellite.

After the disaster of the Russian lunar mission last Sunday, the world today watched with bated breath the second phase of the Indian space operation Chandrayaan-3, which, after automatically performing a series of complex maneuvers, landed on the surface of the Moon, near the South Pole, where no one has ever landed.

Director of the Indian Space Agency Sreedhara Somanath, during a video conference with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was at the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, confirmed the fact of a perfect landing on the Moon. “We managed to land the station perfectly. India is on the Moon!” Somanath said.

In the next few hours, the Vikram lander will be launched from a small lunar rover weighing 26 kilograms on Earth and only 4.29 kilograms on the Moon, to explore the vicinity of the landing zone. This will not be an easy task: the territory of the South Pole is very rugged, covered with huge craters and deep cracks. The aim of the Indian mission, just like the planned mission of Russia, will be to search for huge deposits of ice that may be hidden under the surface of the Moon, in those points where the sun rays have not reached for billions of years.

The Indian mission will last just under two weeks, that is, as long as sunlight continues to illuminate the photovoltaic panels and thus recharge the batteries of the Vikram module and the Praghian rover. Day after day, the complex tools of the lander and rover will analyze the environment and soil in search of lunar ice. If such masses are indeed found, this revolutionary discovery will pave the way for the construction of permanent habitable bases on the Moon.

An earlier attempt by India’s Chandrayaan-2 mission failed in 2019, and the latest mission came just days after Luna-25, Russia’s first lunar mission in nearly 50 years, crashed on the lunar surface.