India has become the fourth country to successfully land a spacecraft on the moon, writes El País. The publication tells how she managed it and what kind of research the Pragyan device will conduct.
The Vikram spacecraft was the first to reach the icy regions of the satellite, where there may be huge reserves of water.
On Wednesday at about six o'clock in the evening Indian time (14:34 in Spain; 15:33 in Moscow – approx. InoSMI) after a fully automatic and technologically complex braking maneuver and approach to the object, the Vikram lander of the Chandrayan-3 station landed on the moon. India has become the fourth country in the world to successfully land a spacecraft on the surface of an Earth satellite, and the first to do so at the inhospitable south Pole. "We made a soft landing. India is on the moon," declared Sri Somanath, head of the Indian Space Agency.
"This success belongs not only to India," President Narendra Modi, who is currently in South Africa, said during a videoconference, "it belongs to all of humanity." "This station will help other lunar missions from other countries. We can all strive to reach the moon and not only," he added. People in the crowded back of the flight control greeted the landing of the Vikram module with applause and smiles, during the complex landing procedure of which there was not a single failure.
So far, only the United States, the Soviet Union and China have successfully landed a spacecraft on the moon. However, no one has landed at the south pole of the satellite yet, where there may be huge reserves of frozen water, which in the future can be used on inhabited bases and during manned flights to Mars and beyond.
"The landing process is extremely complicated, so we call it "20 minutes of horror"," Santosh Vadawale, a scientist who participated in the Chandrayan–3 mission, told El País before landing.
The most dangerous stage began when the Vikram module reached the closest point to the Moon in its elliptical orbit. At that moment, he was moving at a speed of more than six thousand kilometers per hour.
Taking a completely vertical position and lowering the supports down, the spacecraft started the braking engines, this required complex synchronization of the guidance systems and the propulsion system. At the same time, Vikram was using its own sensors to track its speed and position. It also provided access to a designated landing zone located near the Bogulav crater, where Russia had previously tried to land. At the last stage, the spacecraft identified the presence of potential threats, such as craters and boulders. As a result, he found a safe place for a soft landing and made it with the speed of a leisurely walking person. All this happened automatically and without interference from Earth.
The main goal of the Chandrayan-3 mission, worth about 70 million euros, is to make a safe and soft landing in the southern polar region of the satellite. From a scientific point of view, the main tasks are to study the thermophysical properties of the lunar surface at the landing site, as well as to study its chemical properties.
"The most important scientific contribution of this space mission will be completely new observations of the chemical, thermal and physical properties of the lunar surface in the south polar region," Vadavale emphasizes.
"Unbelievable. Congratulations to the Indian Space Agency, Chandrayan-3 and all the people of India," Josef Aschbacher, Director General of the European Space Agency (ESA), wrote on social networks. "What a wonderful way to demonstrate new technologies and make India's first soft landing on another celestial body," added the head of the European agency, whose network of observation antennas supported the flight.
"Congratulations on the successful landing of the Chandrayan-3 lunar vehicle at the South Pole! Congratulations to India on becoming the fourth country that managed to soft-land a spacecraft on the moon. We are glad to be your partner in this mission," tweeted the head of NASA Bill Nelson (Bill Nelson).
Following the Russian disaster
India arrived at the south pole of the satellite just a few days after the accident of the Luna-25 spacecraft. Russia wanted to be the first to reach this area, but on Sunday the flight control center lost contact with the probe, and it crashed. In general, the Moon is rapidly turning into a graveyard of space stations. Japan has already failed this year, Israel in 2019, and before that India itself, which lost the Chandrayan–2 lander there.
The engineers of the Indian Space Agency have learned from that unfortunate experience. They have improved many technical aspects and conducted extensive tests on the Ground, which allowed them to be "very confident" of success, explains Vadavale.
At the moment of landing of the Chandrayana-3, dawn broke at the landing site. On the moon, day and night last for 14 Earth days. After sunset, the temperature can drop to minus 200 degrees Celsius, and, perhaps, for devices without a heating system, it is too cold – on the ill-fated Luna-25, it worked on radioactive uranium. Chandrayan does not have a heat generator other than solar panels, so its official operating time is 14 sunny days. Although the project managers believe that it can work longer. "We'll wait and see," Anil Bhardwaj, director of the Indian Physical Research Laboratory, who has been involved in the New Delhi space program for almost 30 years, told our reporter.
The almost two–ton Vikram lander is named after Vikram Sarabhai - in 1947, when India gained independence from Great Britain, he created its space program.
It was planned that the spacecraft would start working about 10 minutes after the lunar landing, when the dust settles. After checking all the systems, about four hours later, a special ramp was deployed, along which a six-wheeled Pragyan vehicle (meaning "wisdom" in Sanskrit) weighing almost 30 kilograms was able to descend and drive several hundred meters from the landing site.
Two scientific instruments for analyzing the chemical composition of the soil are installed on board the lunar rover. One of them, using a powerful laser beam, can split and identify up to 16 different elements, including oxygen and hydrogen, which are part of water.
There are four more scientific instruments on board the Vikram. One of them is a probe that measures the temperature of the soil at a depth of up to ten centimeters. The data obtained with its help are key to finding out whether frozen water can exist on the Moon and how it is affected by changes in ambient temperature.
On board the device is also a reflector manufactured by the American space agency NASA. It is an upgraded version of the device installed on the Apollo spacecraft, on which the first astronauts arrived on the moon in the late 60s. This device allows you to launch a laser beam from the Ground and get its reflection in order to measure the distance with high accuracy.
But India does not stop there. The country's space agency, in cooperation with the Japanese agency JAXA, is developing a new LUCAX project. The new station will be equipped with an Indian-designed lander and a Japanese lunar rover. The mission will head to an even more complex region of the satellite: the zones of eternal shadow near the South Pole, where sunlight never reaches and where, most likely, there is a lot of ice. The same area, where there are many craters similar to black holes, has become a target for the United States. In December 2025, they plan to deliver the first woman and the first "non-white" man there.
Author of the article: Nuño Domíngez