Completed process of sending chandrayaan 3 from india
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India has made history as its Moon mission becomes the first to land in the lunar south pole region.
With this, India joins an elite club of countries to achieve a soft landing on the Moon, after the US, the former Soviet Union and China.
The Vikram lander from Chandrayaan-3 successfully touched down as planned at 18:04 local time (12:34 GMT).
Celebrations have broken out across the country, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying "India is now on the Moon".
"We have reached where no other country could. It's a joyous occasion," he added. Mr Modi was watching the event live from South Africa where he is attending the Brics summit.
Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) chief Sreedhara Panicker Somanath said the successful landing "is not our work alone, this is the work of a generation of Isro scientists".
India's achievement comes just days after Russia's Luna-25 spacecraft spun out of control and crashed into the Moon.
The crash also put the spotlight on how difficult it is to land in the south pole region where the surface is "very uneven" and "full of craters and boulders".
India's second lunar mission, which also attempted to soft-land there in 2019, was unsuccessful - its lander and rover were destroyed, though its orbiter survived.
On Wednesday, tense moments preceded the touchdown as the lander - called Vikram after Isro founder Vikram Sarabhai - began its precarious descent, carrying within its belly the 26kg rover named Pragyaan (the Sanskrit word for wisdom).
The lander's speed was gradually reduced from 1.68km per second to almost zero, enabling it to make a soft landing on the lunar surface.
In a few hours - scientists say once the dust has settled - the six-wheeled rover will crawl out of the lander's belly and roam around the rocks and craters on the Moon's surface, gathering crucial data and images to be sent to Earth.
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| Chandrayaan landing on the moon |
What next for India's Moon mission?
One of the mission's major goals is to hunt for water-based ice which, scientists say, could support human habitation on the Moon in future. It could also be used for supplying propellant for spacecraft headed to Mars and other distant destinations. Scientists say the surface area that remains in permanent shadow there is huge and could hold reserves of water ice.
The lander and the rover are carrying five scientific instruments which will help discover the physical characteristics of the surface of the Moon, the atmosphere close to the surface and the tectonic activity to study what goes on below the surface.
The rover is carrying an Indian flag and its wheels also have Isro's logo and emblem embossed on them so that they leave imprints on the lunar soil during the Moon walk, an official told the BBC.
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| part of the Chandrayaan |
Chandrayaan-3, India's third lunar mission, will work to build on the success of the earlier Moon missions and Isro officials say it will help make some "very substantial" scientific discovery.
It comes 15 years after Chandrayaan-1, the country's first Moon mission in 2008, which discovered the presence of water molecules on the parched lunar surface and established that the Moon has an atmosphere during daytime.
And despite failing the soft landing, Chandrayaan-2 was not a complete write-off - its orbiter continues to circle the Moon even today and will help the Vikram lander send images and data to Earth for analysis.
India is not the only country with an eye on the Moon - there's a growing global interest in it, with many other missions headed to the lunar surface in the near future. And scientists say there is still much to understand about the Moon that's often described as a gateway to deep space.
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India’s space agency was the brainchild of Dr Vikram Sarabhai and has now come to represent a success story. Here’s a brief look at how it began.
Chandrayaan-3, the mission that aims to achieve the feat of conducting a “soft” landing on the Moon’s southern pole, launched off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) in Andhra Pradesh on Friday (July 14) afternoon.
It will now take approximately 42 days to reach the Moon. Should it conduct a successful landing, India will become only the fourth country – after the United States, Russia, and China – to have done so.
While a successful launch is only the first step towards a long journey for the spacecraft, Isro’s role in carrying it through has seen great appreciation, and it has become a symbol of national pride for many. That has been the case for long, such as in 2014, when the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) was inserted into the Martian orbit. The low cost of the mission was also highlighted as an achievement
Since its inception in 1969, the country’s space agency Isro has carried out altogether 89 launch missions carrying satellites into space. How did the agency chart this course? We take a look.
Early beginnings of a space agency, from a church in Kerala
The history of space activities in India reflects how little by little, institutions centred around space exploration and research were set up and expanded. Indian scientist EV Chitnis recounted in the book From Fishing Hamlet to Red Planet: India’s Space Journey, a compilation of essays from those involved in this journey, that the first such organisation was the Physical Research Laboratory set up in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.
Along with Vikram Sarabhai, a few scientists worked here but lacked adequate funds. Chitnis recalls putting together two boxes and an asbestos sheet as his work table.
However, Sarabhai was able to secure some resources from both the USSR and the US, even during the period of the Cold War rivalry. His efforts paid off, and on November 21, 1963, a small American sounding rocket, known as Nike Apache, took off from Thumba, a fishing hamlet near Trivandrum, Kerala. This place was chosen for meeting certain geography and physics-related criteria, such as of being at the magnetic equator, which eased the process of the rocket’s launc
Sounding rockets are one or two-stage solid propellant rockets used for probing the upper atmospheric regions and for space research. They also serve as easily affordable platforms to test or prove prototypes of new components intended for use in launch vehicles and satellites. “With the establishment of the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) in 1963 at Thumba, a location close to the magnetic equator, there was a quantum jump in the scope for aeronomy and atmospheric sciences in India,” Isro’s
Chandrayaan-3, the mission that aims to achieve the feat of conducting a “soft” landing on the Moon’s southern pole, launched off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) in Andhra Pradesh on Friday (July 14) afternoon.
It will now take approximately 42 days to reach the Moon. Should it conduct a successful landing, India will become only the fourth country – after the United States, Russia, and China – to have
The building was later converted into the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre Space Museum in 1985. “It was in this church the first rocket systems were assembled and integrated. The building assumed multifaceted roles in the beginning of ISRO by acting as the first lab and as the main office for scientists in the early days,” the VSSC website notes.
Towards INSCOPAR and ISRO
In 1962, Nehru and Sarabhai established the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) as an autonomous body that was a part of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), then headed by the pioneering Indian scientist Homi J Bhabha.
The ICONOSPAR grew to become the Indian Space Research Organisation in 1969. With the establishment of the ISRO and further with the government of India forming a dedicated Department of Space (DOS) in 1972, research and execution of space-related enterprises got a boost. ISRO was also brought under the DOS.
ISRO now has its headquarters in Bengaluru. Its activities are spread across various centres and units. Launch Vehicles are built at Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram; satellites are designed and developed at U R Rao Satellite Centre (URSC), Bengaluru; integration and launching of satellites and launch vehicles are carried out from Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC), and so on.
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