Chandrayaan-3 (lunar station)

2023

Indian moon rover Pragyan makes successful moon landing

On August 23, 2023, India became the first country in the world to successfully land a spacecraft at the south pole of the moon. The lander of the Chandrayan-3 Indian automatic lunar station made a soft landing, the Indian Space Research Organization said.

The station will investigate soil, craters and traces of tectonic activity. In addition, the device will send the received data and images of the Earth's satellite to Earth. The lunar rover mission is designed for 14 Earth days.

It is expected that the payload of the lunar rover of the Chandrayan-3 mission will provide breakthrough knowledge about the elemental composition of the lunar surface. X-ray spectrometer of alpha particles and spectroscope with laser guidance are installed on the lunar rover.

Also, detectors are installed on the descent module "Vikram." ChaSTE (Chandra Terrestrial Thermophysical Experiment), one of the useful modules of the descent vehicle is designed to measure the thermal properties of the lunar surface near the polar region. The lander also carries the Rambh-Langmuir probe, which will measure plasma (ions, electrons) around the landing site for one lunar day (14 Earth days), and a lunar seismic activity instrument that will provide new information on lunar earthquakes and micrometeorites.

Lunar rover of the Indian lunar research missions Chandrayan-2 and Chandrayan-3

The Indian lunar rover Pragyan is very small and weighs 26 kg - for comparison, Soviet devices weighed more than 700 kg, and Chinese - 140. A laser and alpha spectrometer are installed on it, with the help of which it will examine the composition of the soil and try to record the presence of water. In addition, with the help of cameras, scientists examine craters in the landing zone to reconstruct the history of the fall of asteroids on the moon. However, due to its small size, the lunar rover will be able to maintain communication with the Earth only through the lander, so that the research area is limited by a circle with a radius of 500 meters.^[1]

Successful launch

On July 14, 2023, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) announced the successful launch of the Mark-3 (LVM3) rocket with the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft (Chandrayaan-3), an automatic interplanetary station designed to explore the moon.

The carrier launched from the cosmodrome at the Satish Dhawan Space Center on the island of Sriharikota in the Bay of Bengal. About 16 minutes after launch, the Chandrayaan-3 separated from the rocket and entered orbit around the Earth. The station should land on the lunar surface near the south pole on August 23, 2023.

Chandrayaan-3

If the mission is successful, India will become the fourth country to be able to perform a soft landing of the spacecraft on the moon - after the USSR, USA and China. Moreover, this will be the first ever soft landing in the south pole zone of the moon. The project plans to use a rover that will study the lunar surface for about two weeks. In addition, the program provides for a number of scientific experiments. The cost of the project is estimated at $77 million.

This landmark achievement is a testament to the tireless dedication of our scientists. I welcome their work and ingenuity, "Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said.

The Chandrayan-3 landing vehicle has a Langmuir RAMBHA-LP plasma probe, a ChaSTE thermophysical surface survey device, a three-component ILSA seismograph, etc. In turn, the six-wheel lunar rover contains two navigation cameras and two scientific devices - a LIBS laser spectrometer for determining the elemental composition of rocks and an APXS alpha-X spectrometer for analyzing soil and rocks using X-ray fluorescence.^[2]

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