2023-08-23 01:54:18
India is preparing to land its unmanned rocket on the Moon on Wednesday, a historic moment for the world’s most populous country which hopes to join the very exclusive club of those who have succeeded in a controlled moon landing, four years following an attempt failed.
Chandrayaan-3 is expected to land on the Moon shortly following 6:00 p.m. India time (12:30 GMT), near the little-explored lunar south pole, which would be a world first for a space program.
This new attempt of the Indian program, in full swing, comes four years following a bitter failure, the ground team having lost contact shortly before the arrival on the Moon.
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.
This mission takes place just days following Luna-25, the first probe to be launched by Russia to the Moon since 1976, crashed there.
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.
“Confident”
The Indian rocket is indeed much less powerful than the Saturn V, the rocket of the American Apollo 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.
India’s former space chief, K. Sivan, believes that the latest photos transmitted by the mission indicate that the last leg of the journey should be successful.
“It encourages us (to think) that the mission will successfully land without problems,” he told AFP on Monday.
According to Sivan, ISRO has made corrections following the failure four years ago. The scientists had then lost contact with the lunar module a few moments before its landing.
“Chandrayaan-3 will go regarding it with more robustness,” he added, “we are confident, we expect everything to go well.”
Smooth sailing
On the eve of the landing, ISRO said on social media that the process for the landing was going according to plan and that the control center was “vibrating with energy and excitement”.
“The navigation continues smoothly,” said the space agency on X (ex-Twitter).
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.
The previous moon landing attempt in 2019, which coincided with the 50th anniversary of American Neil Armstrong’s first moon landing, cost $140 million (124 million euros), nearly double the cost of the current mission.
The first Asian country to place a satellite in orbit around Mars in 2014, India is expected to launch a three-day manned mission into Earth orbit by next year.
India’s efforts to explore the lunar south pole would make a “very, very important” contribution to scientific knowledge, Mr Sivan said.
Only Russia, the United States and China have already managed a controlled landing on the lunar surface.
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