2023-08-28 01:25:44
The Indian space agency, ISRO, has released the first images of the Pragyan rover touching the lunar soil, after descending from the Vikram lander of the Chandrayaan 3 mission.
A short video published by ISRO on his Instagram account shows how shortly after the mission landed near the Moon’s south pole on August 23, Pragyan descended the deployed ramp from the landing module. landing to reach the ground and leave their first tracks on the lunar surface.
The six-wheeled vehicle weighing 26 kilos It will use its navigation cameras to survey the area — where no spacecraft has ever landed before — and transmit images back to Earth, and then ISRO will send instructions to the rover, which can travel up to 500 meters from the lander, called the Vikram.
If all goes according to plan, small rocks or bumps in the path of the Pragyan should not present any major obstacles, as they the rover has a suspension mechanism capable of moving up and down 50 millimetersinforma Bloomberg.
India thus becomes the second nation with an operational rover on the lunar surfacenext to the Yutu-2 of China’s Chang’e 4 mission, which is located on the far side of the Moon.
Compared to China’s beefy rover, India’s probably won’t last long. ISRO has said that Pragyan has a lifespan of only one lunar day, or 14 Earth days.while Yutu-2 has been operating since early 2019, when it reached the lunar surface as part of a Chinese mission that was the first to land on the surface of the far side of the moon.
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