It Worked! India First to Land Near Moon’s South Pole
India has successfully landed a craft in the southern polar region of the Moon.
This marks the first time any country has landed a craft in that region, and makes India only the fourth country to land on the Moon.
The success comes just days after a Russian mission crashed into the lunar surface attempting to hit the same milestone.
Slow and steady wins the race. After a long journey and the crash of a Russian lander, India has become the first country to successfully perform a soft landing (aka not a crash) in the southern polar region of the Moon. The landing has also made India only the fourth country to ever land on the Moon at all.
According to Reuters, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi called the moment of landing “unforgettable.”
“It is phenomenal,” he continued. “This is a victory cry of a new India.”
The Chandrayaan-3—comprised of a lander called Vikram and a rover called Pragyan—marks a huge success for the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), which generally operates on a much smaller budget than other world space powers. The mission set off on its way to the Moon on July 14, slowly making its way through space to arrive today, the day the Sun rises and begins the two-Earth-week-long lunar day.
Vikram and Pragyan will have until the lunar night sets in to complete the bulk of their work. The robots will run a number of experiments, including an analysis of the mineral composition of the local area.
The area around the Moon’s south pole is of particular interest to researchers, largely because it is home to a fair amount of ice. Scientists hope that this ice can eventually be leveraged to provide water, oxygen, and even fuel—if future MOXIE-like missions have their way—for lunar missions still to come.
And India got there first, which was not an easy task. The terrain in the Moon’s southernmost region is not exactly hospitable, so it’s hard to find a good place to land. And even if you pick one, everything on your approach has to go right.
We saw incredibly recently that “everything going right on the approach” is far from a given, as Russia attempted their own landing in the southern polar region earlier this week. The Luna-25—Russia’s first attempt at a Moon landing since 1976—crashed into the Moon on Monday. Had it succeeded, it would have just beat India to the region, despite launching almost a full month after Chandrayaan-3 on August 11.
But the hare couldn’t stick the landing, and the tortoise reigned supreme. The impressive and reportedly very cost-effective landing is a real feather in India’s cap, one they hope to add to in the near future. The country is looking forward to another lunar expedition —this time in partnership with Japan—also aimed at exploring the Moon’s southernmost region. They’re also prepping to launch a mission intended to study the Sun in September. And on top of all of that, the ISRO is gearing up for what it hopes will be its first manned space mission.
Hopefully, this success will be an adrenaline shot that can propel India into even more wins in space. But for right now, those involved in the Chandrayaan-3 mission are reveling in their current victory.
“We have achieved soft landing on the moon,” S. Somanath, the director of the Indian Space Research Organization, said in a New York Times article. “India is on the moon.”
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