Historical! Indian space mission successfully lands on the moon’s south pole

2023-08-23 21:11:17

The Indian space mission, Chandrayaan-3, successfully landed on the moon’s south pole, after a complex descent maneuver on the surface of the southernmost face of the satellite, never before explored.

Chandrayaan-3 needed 40 days for its journey since it took off on July 14, with the largest and heaviest launch rocket in India.

This probe, made up of a lander and a rover, has practically the same objectives as the previous missionalthough its structure has been extensively reinforced to correct the errors that caused Chandrayaan-2 to end up crashing into the lunar surface in 2019 while trying to land on the moon.

Forty have been the days that its successor has spent in space since it took off from India on July 14, propelled by the most powerful and heaviest rocket available to Indiabut not enough to prevent the probe from having to complete several Earth orbits to gain enough speed to reach lunar orbit, which it entered in the first week of August.

SPACE MILESTONE

After this success, India becomes the fourth country to land on the Moon and the first to do so on its southernmost partwhere experts suspect that they can find water reserves in the form of ice, mainly in craters that never receive sunlight.

That is one of the main goals of the mission, which also plans to conduct various scientific experiments on the ground and analyze the lunar surface during the 14 Earth daysequivalent to half a day on the satellite, which remains in operation.

This would close a chapter that India itself opened in 2008, when its first space mission to the Moon, Chandrayaan-1, pioneered the discovery of direct evidence of water on the satellite.

With its arrival, the Indian probe will also open a new phase of exploration of the Moon, which is marked by the recent increase in interest from several countries to resume their lunar programs to send manned missions or establish bases on the Moonas is the case of the United States, Russia or China, as an intermediate point to reach other levels of space.

A small group that Japan also wants to join this year, with another brief mission that will take off from Earth on August 26, months after the failure of the Japanese aerospace firm Ispace, which tried unsuccessfully last April to become the first private mission. to land on the rugged lunar surface.

India became the fourth country to land on the Moon and the first to do so on its southernmost part. (AP)