India’s Chandrayaan-3 space mission successfully landed on the moon’s south pole, after a complex descent maneuver on the surface of the southernmost face of the satellite, never before explored.
“We have made a soft landing on the Moon“, announced the executive director of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), Sreedhara Panicker Somanath, after the complex maneuver that made India the fourth country to land on the moon, a feat only achieved by the United States, Russia, and China.
Chandrayaan-3 has taken 40 days for its journey since it took off on July 14 with India’s largest and heaviest launch rocket.
“India, I have reached my destination, and so have you!” Chandrayaan-3’s account posted on the X social network, formerly Twitter, shortly after the mission’s success was confirmed.
The mission’s landing module contains an explorer vehicle (rover) that will begin its journey in the next few hours exploration to gather information and samples from the surface, Somanath explained.
“The rover will go out in the next few hours, or in a day, because it might take longer,” he told reporters.
Indian Prime Minister Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi, who is currently in South Africa to attend the BRICS leaders’ summit, paused his speech to follow the moment of the moon landing online.
“These historic moments become the eternal consciousness of the life of the nation. This moment is unforgettable, unprecedented, it is the moment of a clarion call from a developed India, it is a victory cry for the new India”, said the visibly moved prime minister.
The moon landing is a special achievement for India which saw its predecessor mission Chandrayaan-2 fail in 2019, that it had the same objective and that it failed precisely in the deceleration maneuver to touch the lunar surface.
On that occasion, the memory of the country was marked by the image of the prime minister trying to comfort the then head of ISRO, Kailasavadivoo Sivan, with a hug, who broke down in tears with failure.
“We made a promise on Earth and we kept it on the Moon. Our scientific comrades have declared: ‘India is now on the Moon’”, Modi added today.
The Indian space agency had previously explained that the descent of the last 25 kilometers from space to the lunar surface was the “most critical part of the landing.”
In this step, the landing speed was about 1.68 kilometers per second, with the Chandrayaan-3 in a horizontal position, so the maneuver was to go to the vertical position during the descent, which would depend on the precision of a mathematical calculation. .
An error in this calculation was what caused Chandrayaa-2 to fail in September 2019.
The mission command center, MOX, packed with scientists, special guests and journalists began to clap with excitement and hug each other as the distance of descent counted down over two kilometers, with the speed constantly decreasing and exceeding the mark of the previous attempt.
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