A first for India! The Chandrayaan-3 rocket has successfully landed near the South Pole of the Moon, as announced by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) on Wednesday. India has now joined the exclusive club of major space powers, just a few days after a Russian probe crashed in the same region of the unexplored South Pole. ‘This is a historic day for the Indian space sector,’ said Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the social network X, formerly known as Twitter.
Developed by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), Chandrayaan-3 includes a landing module named Vikram, meaning ‘valor’ in Sanskrit, and a mobile robot called Pragyan (‘wisdom’ in Sanskrit) to explore the surface of the Moon. This mission takes place just a few days after Luna-25, the first probe launched by Russia to the Moon since 1976, crashed there.
Chandrayaan-3, launched six weeks ago, took longer to reach the Moon than the American manned Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, which reached it in a matter of days. The Indian rocket is indeed much less powerful than the Saturn V, the rocket of the American lunar program. It had to perform five or six elliptical orbits around the Earth to gain speed before being sent on a month-long lunar trajectory.
A $74.6 million mission
Vikram detached from its propulsion module last week and has been transmitting images of the Moon’s surface since entering lunar orbit on August 5. Now that it has landed, a solar-powered rover is set to explore the surface and transmit data to Earth for two weeks.
This Indian mission, costing $74.6 million (€66.5 million) according to the media, is much lower than that of other countries, demonstrating frugal space engineering. According to industry experts, India manages to keep costs low by reproducing and adapting existing space technology for its own purposes, thanks in part to the abundance of highly skilled engineers who are paid much less than their foreign counterparts.
The previous landing attempt in 2019, which coincided with the 50th anniversary of the first moonwalk by American Neil Armstrong, cost $140 million (€124 million), nearly double the cost of the current mission. Only Russia, the United States, and China have successfully achieved a controlled landing on the lunar surface.
As the first Asian country to place a satellite in orbit around Mars in 2014, India is expected to launch a three-day manned mission in Earth orbit by next year.
With AFP