What is India doing in space?
India has long been a space power, launching its first satellite in 1980. Initially, the missions were set purely utilitarian: the government did not consider flying to the Moon or Mars, while the inhabitants of the country were starving. Instead, launching the satellites was supposed to provide India with communications and scientific data from Earth drilling.
By the 21st century, the living standard of the Indians and the technological level of the space industry have greatly increased. In 2008, India launched the first deep space mission to explore the moon. As part of Chandrayan-1 (translated from Sanskrit as “Moon Ship”), a probe was launched into the orbit of a natural satellite of the Earth and a striker was dropped on the surface of the South Pole Region. The collision ejected the lunar soil, and then the orbiter’s spectrometer detected water in this cloud even before the American LRO satellite mapped its distribution on the Moon.
The 2019 Chandrayaan-2 mission has already made a soft landing on the moon with a lunar rover, but lost contact with the device at an altitude of several kilometers. As a result, he crashed. Also in 2014, India launched the Mangalyan spacecraft into Mars orbit. In the future, the Indian Space Research Organization plans to build its own space station, continue to explore the moon, orbit Venus and hypothetically send a probe to Jupiter; Only the USA and Europe have been able to do this throughout human history. .
What apparatus landed on the moon now?
Chandrayaan-3 consists of two main components: a lander and a small lunar rover. The launch took place on 14 July with the GSLV Mk.III rocket. The moon landing is planned at a point with coordinates 69.36 S, approximately in the polar region where Luna-25 should land. 32,335 E
When creating the Vikram lander, the engineers emphasized reliability and, in theory, it should withstand even a relatively hard drop. A set of scientific instruments is built into the device: sensors for studying temperature and thermal conductivity, a seismometer and a probe for plasma analysis.
The Indian lunar rover “Pragyan” is very small and weighs 26 kg – for comparison, Soviet vehicles weigh more than 700 kg, and Chinese vehicles – more than 140. Pragyan has a laser and an alpha spectrometer installed to examine the composition. try to correct the presence of soil and water. In addition, scientists are using cameras to examine craters in the landing zone to reconstruct the history of asteroid impacts on the Moon. However, due to its small size, the lunar rover will only be able to communicate with Earth via the landing module, so its research area will be limited to a circle with a radius of 500 meters. “Pragyan” should work on one lunar day (14 Earth days).
The orbiting flight module that got the device to the Moon needs a few more months to test the equipment and observe Earth in the near-infrared range.
Differences between “Chandrayan-3” and “Luna-25”
Both missions were targeting the South Pole region of the Moon. Because of its abundant water ice content, it is particularly important to scientists, including the construction of a lunar base. Ice can be used to produce fuel, to cool spacesuits and equipment, and as a raw material for chemical reactions.
But the Luna-25, unlike the Indian mission, did not include the use of a lunar rover. Instead, a powerful set of scientific instruments and a mechanized scoop were placed on the Russian probe to create the digs. Chandrayaan-3’s research capabilities are more modest at first glance, and the mission’s main official goal is to land in a way that proves the performance of Indian technology. At the same time, the presence of the Pragyan mobile lunar rover provides additional advantages, despite lighter and simpler scientific instruments. Thanks to him, Indians will be able to explore a large area that is especially important for mapping lunar ice.
Finally, the Chandrayaan-3 mission was slower; The device was launched in mid-July, but raised the near-Earth orbit in several stages so it didn’t reach the Moon until August 5. The transition from an elliptical lunar orbit to a low circular pre-landing orbit also took more than a week, and the landing has only now taken place. The Russian apparatus crashed while attempting to transition from a low circular orbit about 100 km high to an elliptical pre-landing orbit with a perileune (lowest point) of about 18 km.