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Bengaluru, August 23 (Reuters):- An Indian spacecraft landed on the moon on Wednesday in a mission seen as crucial to lunar exploration and India’s standing as a space power, just days after a similar Russian lander crashed.
“This is a victory cry of a new India,” said Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was seen waving the Indian flag as he watched the landing from South Africa, where he is attending the BRICS summit.
Scientists and officials clapped, cheered and hugged each other as the spacecraft landed and as the government now looks to spur investment in private space launches and related satellite-based businesses.
“India is on the moon,” said S. Somanath, chief of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) as the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft landed on the lunar south pole.
This was India’s second attempt to land a spacecraft on the moon and comes less than a week after Russia’s Luna-25 mission failed. People across the country were glued to television screens and said prayers as the spacecraft approached the surface.
Chandrayaan means “moon vehicle” in Hindi and Sanskrit. In 2019, ISRO’s Chandrayaan-2 mission successfully deployed an orbiter but its lander crashed.
The Chandrayaan-3 is expected to remain functional for two weeks, running a series of experiments including a spectrometer analysis of the mineral composition of the lunar surface.
Rough terrain makes a south pole landing difficult, and a first landing is historic. The region’s ice could supply fuel, oxygen and drinking water for future missions.
New York Times adds:
Two visitors from India — a lander named Vikram and a rover named Pragyan — landed in the southern polar region of the moon on Wednesday. The two robots, from a mission named Chandrayaan-3, make India the first country to ever reach this part of the lunar surface in one piece — and only the fourth country ever to land on the moon.
The Indian public already takes great pride in the accomplishments of the nation’s space program, which has orbited the moon and Mars and routinely launches satellites above the Earth with far fewer financial resources than other nations. But the achievement of Chandrayaan-3 may be even sweeter.
“We have achieved soft landing on the moon,” S. Somanath, the director of the Indian Space Research Organization, said after a roar ripped across the ISRO compound just past 6 p.m. local time. “India is on the moon.”
Here’s what you need to know:
The Indian mission launched in July, taking a slower, fuel-conscious route toward the moon. Vikram out-endured its Russian counterpart, Luna-25, which launched 13 days ago for the moon. It was scheduled to land on Monday in the same general vicinity as the Indian craft but crashed on Saturday following an engine malfunction.
That India managed to outdo a nation that put the first satellite, man and woman in space is a measure of the country’s long embrace of the science and technology needed to support a space program. But the landing also comes at a particularly important moment in the South Asian giant’s rise.
The Aug. 23 landing was selected because it is the day when the sun will rise at the landing site. The mission is to conclude two weeks later when the sun sets. While on the surface, the solar-powered lander and rover will use a range of instruments to make thermal, seismic and mineralogical measurements.
The landing was seen by around 7 million viewers on the YouTube channel of the Indian Space Research Organization, and many more people on Indian TV broadcasts.
The Deep Space Network, a NASA network of large dish antennas, is assisting ISRO in communicating with the ground. Right now, it shows Chandrayaan-3 sending and receiving signals.
India’s main opposition party, the Indian National Congress, joins in the celebrations. “We are deeply indebted to the remarkable hard work, unparalleled ingenuity and unflinching dedication of our scientists, space engineers, researchers,” Mallikarjun Kharge, the party’s president, said.
What’s next for India in space exploration.
India has a busy decade of space exploration ahead.
S. Somanath, the director of Indian Space Research Organization, has described the current moment as an inflection point, as the country opens its space programs to private investors after half a century of state monopoly that made advances but at a “a shoestring budget mode of working.”
A large share of India’s space efforts in the coming years will focus on the moon.
In addition to the scientific results of Chandrayaan-3, India is preparing a joint lunar exploration with Japan, in which India will provide the lander and Japan the launch vehicle and the rover. The robotic mission, known as LUPEX, is also intended for exploring the South Pole of the moon.
Although an Indian astronaut flew to orbit in 1984, the country has never sent humans to space on its own. It is therefore preparing its first astronaut mission to space, called Gaganyaan. But the project, which aims to send three Indian astronauts to space on the country’s own spacecraft, has faced delays, and ISRO has not announced a date for it.
ISRO will first have to conduct a test flight of the Gaganyaan spacecraft with no astronauts aboard. Officials have said they are at the stage of perfecting the crew escape system, and they said this month that they had tested the drogue parachutes, which help stabilize the capsule that the astronauts will ride as they return to Earth.
Additionally, India is preparing for the Aditya L-1 mission, which plans to study the sun. While no date for the solar mission has been announced, the spacecraft is being integrated with the rocket, a sign that it may be almost ready for launch. ISRO officials have said that it will carry seven payloads to study the photosphere chromosphere and the outermost layers of the sun using electromagnetic and particle detectors.
Another mission is the collaborative NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar, or NISAR, which will monitor changes in our planet’s land and ice surfaces from orbit. It is slated to launch from India next year.
The country will also launch a second Mars orbiter mission. The first Mars mission, Mangalyaan, successfully entered the planet’s orbit in 2014 and remained in communication with ISRO until the mission concluded in 2022 when the spacecraft lost power. It made India the first country to achieve Martian orbit on its first attempt, and demonstrated that the country could show scientific prowess even when resources are constrained: The mission’s budget of about $75 million was less than the $100 million budget of the Hollywood space film “Gravity.”
In South Africa, President Cyril Ramaphosa celebrated the successful landing during a summit of the five-member group of nations known as BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. “This, for us as the BRICS family, is a momentous occasion, and we rejoice with you,” he said to applause.
The ISRO leadership who managed Chandrayaan-3 make clear the failure of their last moon landing attempt, in 2019, was a major driving force. “From the day we started rebuilding our spacecraft after Chandaryaan-2 experience, it has been breathe in breathe out Chandrayaan-3 for our team,” said Kalpana Kalahasti, the mission’s associate project director.
The lander has landed! Mr. Modi’s face was streamed on screen, silently smiling, during the final hundred meters’ descent. Now the speeches begin, and everyone is clapping.
The landing attempt, in its final minutes, is being viewed by 7.5 million people on ISRO’s youtube channel, and it is broadcast live on Indian news channels.
The moon may be the easiest place in the solar system to land, or crash.
Once a robotic spacecraft is commanded to land on the moon, there is no turning back.
The task is not easy, but in many ways, the moon is the easiest place in the solar system to land a spacecraft from Earth.
It is the closest destination, less than a quarter-million miles away. It is much smaller than Earth or the other planets, so its gravity is weaker and it is easier to slow spacecraft down.
Unlike Mars, the moon’s atmosphere doesn’t generate searing temperatures on the outside of the spacecraft during descent. Venus is even more hellish, with temperatures close to 900 degrees Fahrenheit at the surface and corrosive sulfuric acid in the atmosphere.
Yet when Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft crashed into the moon on Saturday, two days before a planned landing attempt, it was the latest in a series of impacts, belly flops and hard landings since 1959, when the Soviet Union’s Luna-2 became the first probe to hit the moon.
Some crashes were setbacks. Others were intentional, marking the end of a successful mission. Whatever the cause, space agencies have learned from each collision. Crashes can reveal software glitches or weaknesses in a spacecraft’s design, and they can expose material under the lunar surface for future study.
The Vikram lander and Pragyan rover on Chandrayaan-3 are almost identical to the ones that were aboard Chandrayaan-2 four years ago. Indeed, their names are unchanged.
The Chandrayaan-2 landing attempt on Sept. 6, 2019, appeared to be going well, until the lander was about 1.3 miles above the surface. Then its trajectory diverged from the planned path.
The problems arose because one of the lander’s five engines had thrust that was slightly higher than expected, S. Somanath, the chairman of India’s space agency, said during a news conference last month. With the spacecraft firing its engines to slow down, that meant it slowed more than anticipated.
The spacecraft tried to correct its path, but its software specified limits on how quickly it could turn. And because of the higher thrust, the lander was still some distance from its destination even as it approached the ground.
“The craft is trying to reach there by increasing velocity to reach there, whereas it was not having enough time to,” Mr. Somanath said.
In essence, the spacecraft’s computer was unable to find a solution that could satisfy all of the requirements for how and where it was supposed to land, and as a result, it crashed.
Months later, an amateur internet sleuth used imagery from a NASA spacecraft to locate the crash site, where the debris of the Vikram and Pragyan sit to this day.
Although the design of the Chandrayaan-3 lander is largely the same, engineers made alterations to avoid a repeat of the 2019 crash. Changes include stronger landing legs, more propellant, additional solar cells to gather energy from the sun and improved sensors to measure the altitude.
The software was also fixed so that the spacecraft could turn faster if needed, and the allowed landing area has been expanded.
If they get to the moon, the lander and the rover will use a range of instruments to make thermal, seismic and mineralogical measurements of the area.
It was a difficult weekend for Russia’s space program.
When Russia’s robotic Luna-25 mission launched on Aug. 11, it seemed set on a course to deny the Indian Chandrayaan-3 mission its shot at becoming the first spacecraft to land on the moon successfully this year.
But things turned out differently.
While Chandrayaan-3 took a steady, fuel-saving course to lunar orbit, Luna-25 rushed toward the moon, arriving there only five days after launching.
The Russian vehicle appeared to execute a series of orbital adjustments. Then, on Saturday, disaster struck.
At 2:10 p.m. Moscow time, Luna-25 fired its engines in order to move the spacecraft into an elliptical orbit that would prepare it for landing on Monday. By 2:57 p.m., Russia had lost contact with the spacecraft.
Yury Borisov, the head of Roscosmos, the state corporation that oversees Russia’s space program, described what was said to have gone wrong to the Rossiya 24 TV channel. The engine had been programmed to fire for 84 seconds. Instead, it fired for 127 seconds. That extra push sent the spacecraft on a collision course with the lunar surface. After nearly a day of silence, Roscosmos disclosed the failure on Sunday.
Mr. Borisov did not explain what had caused the engine to fire for too long. In an interview with The Times on Sunday, Natan Eismont, a senior scientist with the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that there had been indications that the engine had performance problems during Luna-25’s mission to the moon. Though not involved in the mission, he suggested that its managers may have needed to take more time before attempting the fateful burn that destroyed the spacecraft.
Students in uniforms sit with their legs crossed with some holding their hands up in prayer and others holding signs in Hindi script or pictures of a spacecraft in front of adults and an Indian flag.
Across India on Wednesday, there was an air of excitement and anticipation.
In a country with a deep tradition of science, schools were holding special ceremonies and organizing live viewings of the moon landing. Prayers were offered for the mission’s success at Hindu temples, Sikh Gurdwaras and Muslim mosques — an important moment of unity in what has otherwise been fraught times of sectarian tension.
Radio jockeys beamed with excitement, repeating the evening landing time before playing joyful songs. Television channels ran countdown clocks and competed in tickers. “INDIA’S MOON SHOT,” read the chyron at the bottom of one channel’s screen.
In Delhi, students made artwork celebrating what they hope will be a historic day — India joining just three other countries in landing on the moon and becoming the first to land in its southern polar region. In Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, the government there has announced that schools would remain open in the evening for students to gather and watch the broadcast from mission control.
“We are very proud to say we are Indian because of our scientists,” one student from the southern city of Hyderabad told a television channel.
The police band in the city of Mumbai, India’s commercial and entertainment hub, sent a “special musical tribute” to the scientists working on the mission. They performed a popular patriotic song, Hum Honge Kaamyaab.
“There is full faith,” the song, in Hindi, says. “We will succeed.”
The mood around the landing, which will take place just a little after sunset in India, was captured by the opening line of an article in Times of India.
“When the sun sets on Wednesday, look at the moon: India may be up there.”
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