The country succeeded in landing its Chandrayaan-3 rocket on the Moon, joining a very exclusive club made up so far of the United States and Russia.
India has successfully landed its rocket on the moon, the Indian space agency announced on Wednesday. Chandrayaan-3, which means “moon ship” in Sanskrit, landed near the lunar South Pole, a little explored area.
Four years after a failed attempt, the most populous country in the world joins the United States and Russia among the nations that have managed a controlled moon landing, a very closed club that now poses India as a great space power.
The success of India’s burgeoning program comes four days after the failed landing of the Russian Luna-25 probe, the first probe to be launched by Russia to the Moon since 1976, which crashed on our satellite.
Developed by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), Chandrayaan-3 includes a landing module called Vikram, meaning “valour” in Sanskrit, and a mobile robot, called Pragyan (“wisdom” in Sanskrit) to explore the surface of the Moon.
Upcoming Moon Exploration
Chandrayaan-3, launched six weeks ago, was slower to reach the Moon than the manned US Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, which got there in days.
The Indian rocket is indeed much less powerful than the Saturn V, the rocket of the American lunar program. She had to make five or six elliptical orbits around the Earth to gain speed, before being sent on a lunar trajectory lasting a month.
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. The solar-powered rover is now to explore the surface and will transmit data to Earth for two weeks.