2023-08-24 08:20:17
India, the world’s most populous country, began exploring the Moon’s south pole on Thursday following becoming the first nation to land a spacecraft near the still little-known area.
The mobile robot Pragyan (“wisdom” in Sanskrit) “came down from the lander and India walked on the Moon”, welcomed the Indian Space Research Organization in a message on X (ex-Twitter) .
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had called the day before a “historic day” the success of the mission, celebrated throughout the country.
The six-wheeled rover, powered by solar energy, will survey this still poorly mapped area and transmit images and scientific data during the two-week mission.
The moon landing of the Chandrayaan-3 mission, which means “moon ship” in Sanskrit, took place on Wednesday at 12:34 GMT, four years following an aborted attempt at a booming space program.
India thus joins the very restricted club of nations which have successfully carried out such an operation. Only the United States, the Soviet Union and China had already managed to carry out a controlled moon landing.
Russia, which wants to be the heiress of the USSR, has just failed in a new attempt, its Luna-25 probe having crashed in the same region.
The Chandrayaan-3 mission includes a landing module called Vikram, meaning “valour” in Sanskrit, and the mobile robot Pragyan.
Launched six weeks ago, it 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 Saturn V, that of the American lunar program.
See also Takeoff of the Luna-25 probe: why Russia is trying to get back into the race for the Moon
India’s aerospace program has a relatively modest budget, but one that has been significantly increased since its first attempt to orbit the moon in 2008.
This Indian mission, at a cost of 74.6 million dollars (66.5 million euros), according to the media, much lower than that of other countries, testifies to frugal space engineering.
According to industry experts, India manages to keep costs low by replicating and adapting existing space technology for its own purposes, thanks in part to the abundance of highly skilled engineers who are paid far less than their foreign counterparts.
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