As Chandrayaan-3 successfully landed on the lunar surface to explore the uncharted regions near the south pole, India on Wednesday entered an elite group of three countries that have sent a spacecraft to the Moon. Before India, the erstwhile Soviet Union, the United States, and China have all accomplished soft landings on the Moon and even gathered samples of soil and rocks from the lunar surface to earth.
Hailing the achievement, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said India is now on the moon and the success of the lunar mission has sounded the bugle for the emergence of a developed nation. With the successful landing on the moon, India has become the fourth country to master the technology of soft-landing on the lunar surface after the US, China and the erstwhile Soviet Union. But no country has ever landed a rover on the treacherous south pole that scientists believe could hold important reserves of frozen water and precious elements.
USSR (now Russia) Moon Mission
Not all these missions were successful in their first attempts, with the then USSR succeeding in making a lunar impact on its sixth space flight. The Luna-2 mission of the Soviet Union crashed on the moon on September 14, 1959, making it the first human-made object to hit another celestial body. This was a hard-landed spacecraft but the country managed to soft-land seven years later in 1966.
USA’s Moon Mission
Similarly, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) could taste success in the lunar missions on July 31, 1964, after 13 failed attempts to crash land on the moon. NASA’s Ranger 7 was a major turning point in the race to the moon as it sent back 4,316 images before crashing into the lunar surface. The United States spacecraft made a soft landing on the moon a few months after Russia in 1966. The US already has 11 soft landings which is the most in the world.
China’s Moon Mission
China’s Chang’e Project started with orbiter missions to the Moon, which generated detailed maps of the lunar surface to identify future sites for soft landings. The Chang’e 3 and 4 missions launched on December 2, 2013 and December 7, 2018, respectively made a soft landing on the lunar surface and operated rovers to explore the moon. The Chang’e 5 mission was launched on November 23, 2020, landed near the Mons Rumker volcanic formation on the Moon on December 1 and returned to Earth with two kilograms of lunar soil on December 16, the same year.
How India’s lunar mission began?
India’s lunar mission began with the launch of Chandrayaan 1 on October 22, 2008, which put a spacecraft in a 100 km circular orbit around the moon. The spacecraft made 3,400 orbits around the Moon at a height of 100 km from the lunar surface and prepared a chemical, mineralogical and photo-geologic mapping of the Moon. The orbiter mission, which had a mission life of two years, was, however, prematurely aborted after communication with the spacecraft was lost on August 29, 2009.
A decade later, Chandrayaan-2, comprising an orbiter, lander and rover, was successfully launched on July 22, 2019. The objectives of the country’s second mission to the Moon were scientific studies by payloads onboard the orbiter, and technology demonstration of soft landing and roving on the lunar surface. However, the spacecraft crash-landed on the moon on September 6, 2019, due to a software glitch.
(With PTI inputs)
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