India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission has made space travel history today by successfully achieving a soft landing near the south pole of Earth’s Moon, just days after Russia’s Luna 25 spacecraft crashed while attempting to land in the identical region. India is now the fourth nation to realize a soft Moon landing and the primary to have successfully touched down on the lunar south pole — a little-explored area of the Moon that’s believed to contain water ice.
Three other nations — the US, China, and the previous Soviet Union — have all previously achieved a soft landing near the Moon’s equator, a safer region with (comparatively) amiable temperatures and terrain and reliable sunlight to recharge solar-powered instruments. During a live stream of the lander’s touchdown, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that the successful consequence of this mission sets the country up for future human spaceflight.
Against this, much of the Moon’s southern pole is affected by deep craters and basins which are permanently shrouded in darkness. Based on NASA, these areas haven’t seen sunlight in billions of years and may experience temperatures as little as negative 334 degrees Fahrenheit (negative 203 degrees Celsius). The acute conditions in these “cold traps” make distant commentary from Earth difficult and present problems for operating sensitive equipment within the region.
The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft took 22 days to enter the Moon’s orbit on August fifth, following its launch from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on July 14th. On August seventeenth, the Vikram lander carrying Pragyan — a lunar ground rover — successfully separated from its propulsion module in preparation for today’s soft landing.
The mission marks India’s second attempt at a lunar landing after the Chandrayaan-2 lander crashed into the Moon’s surface back in 2019. The following stage of the Chandrayaan-3 mission will involve deploying Pragyan to survey the local environment for one lunar day (around 14 Earth days) and perform a wide range of scientific experiments. These include using X-ray spectrometry to discover the fundamental composition of the Moon’s surface.