India Becomes First To Land Near Moon's South Pole, After Russia Crash
India's Chandrayaan-3 - the word for “moon craft” in Sanskrit - achieved soft landing at 6:04 p.m. local time on Wednesday, after Russia’s Luna-25 crashed into the moon on Sunday.
Before today's landing, the agency said it had perfected the art of making it to the moon, "but it is the landing that the agency is working on," according to The Associated Press.
India’s previous attempt to land a robotic spacecraft near the moon’s little-explored south pole ended in failure in 2019.
It entered the lunar orbit but lost touch with its lander that crashed while making its final descent to deploy a rover to search for signs of water.
According to a failure analysis report submitted to the ISRO, the crash was caused by a software glitch.
The $140-million mission in 2019 was intended to study permanently shadowed moon craters that are thought to contain water deposits and were confirmed by India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission in 2008.
But this time - success...
Chandrayaan-3 Mission:
— ISRO (@isro) August 23, 2023
'India🇮🇳,
I reached my destination
and you too!'
: Chandrayaan-3
Chandrayaan-3 has successfully
soft-landed on the moon 🌖!.
Congratulations, India🇮🇳!#Chandrayaan_3#Ch3
A rover, named Pragyan, or wisdom, is set to analyze the chemical makeup of the moon’s surface and search for water over the course of one lunar day, which is equivalent to 14 days on Earth.
The timing of the successful landing - in the middle of the BRICS Summit, and just days after Russia's epic fail - is not lost of most as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said: "This is an unprecedented moment."
"This is the moment for [a] new, developing India. This is the moment for 1.4 billion" Indians, he said via videolink from South Africa where he is attending the BRICS summit.
"India's successful moon mission is not just India's alone," Modi added, saying it belongs to all of humanity.
Only the United States, the former Soviet Union and China have made soft landings on the surface before.
Finally, as we detailed previously, China, which along with the U.S. is a leading country in space technology, has agreed to pursue a project to establish a human settlement on the moon together with Russia, but this weekend’s crash of the Luna-25 could mean that Moscow, which is the junior partner in the relationship, has less to offer than originally assumed.
China has accelerated its space program in recent years, and is currently the only country (known) to have landed anything on the moon in the 21st century. The CCP also landed a lunar probe on the moon's far side for the first time in history in 2019.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants to bolster the country’s place among the world’s space faring nations and in June India signed the Artemis Accords, a US-backed initiative with more than two dozen other countries to govern joint missions and civilian space exploration.
