Millions of people in India and beyond were glued to the screens with bated breath on Wednesday as Chandrayaan-3’s lander module Vikram made its final descend towards the lunar surface after 41 days of voyage and successfully soft-landed on the Moon, becoming only the fourth country after the US, former Soviet Union and China, to accomplish the feat and the first to land a spacecraft in the south pole region. Scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) centre in Bengaluru and citizens across the county erupted in jubilation when the ambitious mission was declared successful at 06:04 pm on August 23. It was a culmination of years of dedicated hard work and planning, as ISRO chief S Somanath put it after the historic touchdown that the success of the Chandrayaan-3 mission was the work of a generation of ISRO’s leadership and scientists, while describing it as an “incremental progress” since the space agency began its lunar probe programme with Chandrayaan-1 in 2008, and then Chandrayaan-2 in 2019. It clearly indicated that the ISRO benefited from its past experiences and missions – both success and failure. If the country’s first Moon mission Chandrayaan-1 discovered the presence of water molecules on the lunar surface, it was the Chandrayaan-2 that attempted to land on the uncharted region of the Moon more than a decade later. Chandrayaan-2 narrowly missed the planned soft landing but its orbiter, which is still circling the Moon since 2019, will receive information from Chandrayaan-3 Pragyan rover via Vikram lander and send it to the Earth for analysis.
As the Pragyan rover begins exploring the lunar surface, the data it collects over the next 14 days (one lunar day) will be vital in giving an insight into the physical characteristics of the Moon’s surface and study the mineral composition, atmosphere and seismic activities. This mission, which has propelled India’s position in space exploration and geopolitics, has raised the bar for the Indian space agency in the field of space explorations as well as infused confidence to go beyond the Moon, and perhaps perform a similar feat on Mars. It will also encourage other countries to foray into such expedition and instil scientific temper in the minds of students across the country. India should learn a lesson or two from the failure of Russia’s Luna 25, which was also planned to soft-land in the south pole ahead of Chandrayaan-3 but crashed after suffering a technical glitch. The chief of Russian space agency Roscosmos has blamed the failure to the country’s decades-long hiatus in the lunar programme, saying that invaluable experience of its past missions had lost over time. This points to the need for framing a long-term vision and maintaining the momentum in the field of science. India needs to increase its spending on research and development to consolidate its place in space technology, and also cash in on its latest success, which is likely to open the floodgate of opportunities for several sectors, especially space-related start-ups. Chandrayaan-3 should not be the end but the beginning of bigger missions.
