India ensured front-row seat in global space club

Dinesh C Sharma

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Bengaluru, August 23

The successful touchdown of the Vikram lander on the moon is a testament to India’s scientific and technological capabilities built over the decades, and it ensures India a front-row seat in the global space club, which is witnessing rapid changes.

After the glitch faced by Chandrayaan-2, which resulted in the loss of the lander a little over four years ago, ISRO scientists went back to the drawing board to design a near fail-safe mission. They incorporated several new features and redundancies in the crucial phase of ‘power descent’ of the lander — two cameras for hazard detection instead of one, improved algorithm (for control, navigation and guidance) to spot a perfect site for landing, changes in the central engine, etc. All this gave ISRO scientists the confidence to make the surprising claim that Vikram would land even if everything were to fail.

For any spacefaring nation interested in exploring deep space, achieving the technologically challenging soft landing capability is a critical milestone. Since 2019, when Chandrayaan-2 failed, missions sent by Japan, Israel, and the UAE (launched by a Japanese company) have failed to soft-land on the lunar surface. The latest to miss the moon was the Russian mission last week, though the erstwhile USSR and Russia have had many successful soft-landing and ‘sample return’ missions in the past. More flights — such as Japan’s SLIM, or Smart Lander for Investigating Moon — are headed to the moon this year. Chandrayaan-3 has great significance for lunar science as this mission was designed to land in the south pole region, which is thought to be rich in water-ice. While the region has been extensively imaged by orbiting missions, no probe has explored it on ground. With data from this mission, ISRO hopes to build upon the discovery of water-bearing molecules that was made by Chandrayaan-1.

The success of Chandrayaan-3 will boost ISRO’s ambitions for future missions, including those capable of bringing back samples from the moon. It has no direct bearing on the manned Gaganyaan project.

(Science commentator)