India Becomes First Country To Land A Spacecraft On The Moon

India has become the world’s first country to successfully land a spacecraft on the moon’s south pole.

The Chandrayaan-3 mission was proclaimed a success on Wednesday, August 23, when the Vikram lander landed in the moon’s South Pole at 1.34 p.m.

The Vikram lander of the project travelled at around 1.68km per second and fired its engines to successfully orient the probe vertically to the Moon’s surface. No other country has ever made a soft landing on the Moon’s south pole, which is believed to have water ice in its shadowed craters.

The Chandrayaan mission is India’s third. Both Chandrayaan-1 in 2008 and Chandrayaan-2 earlier this year failed to land.

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The successful space mission sparked jubilation throughout India, especially in Bengaluru, a southern Indian city where space experts watching the landing erupted in shouts and applause. After a failed effort in 2019, India has now joined the United States, the Soviet Union, and China in accomplishing this milestone.

The successful moon trip highlights India’s growing status as a technological and space superpower, and it fits perfectly with the picture of the country that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is attempting to project: an ascendant country establishing its place among the global elite.

According to S. Somnath, chairman of the state-run Indian Space Research Organization, the lunar rover would slide down a flap from the lander within hours or a day and undertake tests, including an investigation of the mineral composition of the lunar surface.

Somnath stated that the expedition would take two weeks and that India would afterwards attempt a manned lunar trip.

Nuclear-armed Last year, India’s economy grew to become the world’s fifth-largest, and the success of the lunar mission will undoubtedly boost Modi’s popularity ahead of a vital general election next year.

The successful landing by India comes just days after Russia’s Luna-25, which was aiming for the same lunar location, spun out of control and crashed. It would have been Russia’s first successful lunar landing in 47 years. The failure, according to Russia’s president of the state-controlled space enterprise Roscosmos, was due to a lack of knowledge caused by a long pause in lunar study following the previous Soviet mission to the moon in 1976.