India has now joined an exclusive club of countries that have managed a soft landing on the Moon
Chandrayaan 3, India’s 3rd expedition to the moon, landed its rover on August 23, 2023. It will study seismicity and thermal properties of the lunar surface.
The Chandrayaan-3 mission succeeded the Chandrayaan-2 mission of 2019, when the Vikram Lander crashed into the lunar surface. Indian Space Research Organisation chief S Somanath said the upgrades to the mission were “failure-based,” meaning that scientists looked at what went wrong with the Chandrayaan-2 mission to improve its successor.
For example, strengthened legs to ensure that it could land safely up to a speed of 10.8 kilometres per hour. A bigger fuel tank to make sure that it could make last-minute changes if necessary.
The new Vikram Lander had solar panels on all four of its faces instead of just two. The Laser Doppler Velocimeter, which fired laser beams to the lunar surface to calculate the Lander’s speed.
The critical manoeuvre during this phase was transferring the Lander from a high-speed horizontal position to a vertical one. During Chandrayaan-2, Vikram failed to switch from a horizontal position to a vertical position and crashed on the surface of the Moon.
Another critical part of the landing procedure was reducing its horizontal velocity from around 6,000 kilometres per hour when it is at a height of around 30 kilometres above the surface to next to zero when it landed.
India has now joined an exclusive club of countries (the United States, the Soviet Union and China) that have managed a soft landing on the moon.
A landing is considered “soft” if the space probe reaches the surface without damaging itself. This is considered difficult primarily because of the mountainous south pole of the moon.
Russia made its first attempt to land on the Moon since 1976 with the Luna-25 mission that was launched on August 10, 2023 and crashed on the lunar surface, same as Chandrayaan-2.
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