The India-China Mission to the Moon’s South Pole: A Year after Roscosmos, India’s Luna 25 and its First Successful Landing
Just days before India landed, Russia’s Luna25 crashed after it broke up into pieces in the air over the moon. It would have been the first successful Russian lunar landing after a gap of 47 years. Russia’s head of the state-controlled space corporation Roscosmos attributed the failure to the lack of expertise due to the long break in lunar research that followed the last Soviet mission to the moon in 1976.
Excited and anxious, people across India, home to the world’s largest population, crowded around televisions in offices, shops, restaurants and homes. Thousands prayed Tuesday for the success of the mission with oil lamps on the river banks, temples and religious places, including the holy city of Varanasi in northern India.
Chandrayaan means “moon craft” in Hindi. The Vikram landers and the Pragyan rover will be used to land on the moon’s south polar region as part of an attempt to put a human on the lunar surface. The mission is robotic and there are no astronauts aboard.
The south pole region is of interest to many countries and private companies because of the permanently shadowed craters that hold frozen water.
The six-wheeled lander and rover module of Chandrayaan is configured with a bunch of things that it would give to the scientific community on lunar soil and rocks.
India’s previous attempt to land a robotic spacecraft near the moon’s little-explored south pole ended in failure in 2019. It entered the lunar orbit but lost touch with its lander, which crashed while making its final descent to deploy a rover to search for signs of water. According to a failure analysis report submitted to the ISRO, the crash was caused by a software glitch.
The $140-million mission in 2019 was intended to study permanently shadowed moon craters that are thought to contain water deposits and were confirmed by India’s Chandrayaan-1 orbiter mission in 2008.
The anticipation for a successful landing rose after Russia’s failed attempt and as India’s regional rival China reaches for new milestones in space. China hopes to have astronauts on the moon before the end of the decade as it launched a trio of people for its space station in May. There were fatal border clashes between India and China in 2020.
Many countries and companies are competing to land a spaceship on the moon. In April, a Japanese company’s spacecraft apparently crashed while attempting to land on the moon. An Israeli nonprofit tried to achieve a similar feat in 2019, but its spacecraft was destroyed on impact.
While Japan prepares to launch a lunar lander in the weekend, two U.S. companies will try to put a landers on the moon before the year is out. In the future, NASA plans to land astronauts at the lunar south pole in order to take advantage of the frozen water in the craters.
The Russian Luna-25 landing mission: a slip-up by a Russian spacecraft as a result of a misalignment
India’s space program is a source of national pride, as is the country’s growing cadre of commercial space start-ups. India’s efforts in space exploration are very similar to the country’s diplomatic push as an ambitious power on the rise.
The lander is in an elliptical orbit of the moon, swinging as close as about 15 miles above the surface. The ISRO plans to fire their engines at 8:31 a.m. on Wednesday to get the ship out of the air and down to the surface. The engines will further brake its fall, to help it achieve a soft landing.
The Indian Space Research Organization will have a live stream from the mission control room in Bengaluru. You can watch it on ISRO’s YouTube channel or website starting at 7:50 a.m. Eastern.
The day when the sun will rise is when the landing is scheduled to take place. The mission will be over two weeks after the sun sets. While on the surface, the solar-powered lander and rover will use a range of instruments to make thermal, seismic and mineralogical measurements.
The Russia’s Luna-25 landers wasn’t so lucky. On August 20, the craft malfunctioned and appears to have crashed while preparing for a landing planned for the next day. Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, intended to deploy Luna-25 for a year-long mission near the Boguslavsky impact crater, where its eight scientific instruments would also have examined properties of the regolith and pockets of water ice.
The power descent phase began at about 8:15 am ET, during which time the craft’s speed slowed from 1,680 to 358 meters per second, and the altitude dropped from 30 to 7.4 kilometers over a period of 11.5 minutes. During the altitude hold phase, the craft turned its altimeters toward the moon to read how far away it was from the regolith. Then began the fine braking phrase, which ran for nearly 3 minutes, as the altitude was reduced to 800 meters.
The vertical descent phase began around 8:29 am Eastern time, and the craft began its approach to the lunar surface, turning to orient its four legs towards the landing site. It hovered over the surface for a brief time as it collected data on the safety of the landing site. The people in the mission control headquarters in Bengaluru broke into applause after it successfully set down on the regolith. The chairman of the Indian scientific organization exclaimed that India is on the moon. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was watching the show remotely, so Sarabhai asked him to speak. I would like to speak to all of the people of the world on this happy occasion. In his address, Modi said that India’s successful moon mission wasn’t just India’s alone. The success of this will help other countries in the future. I’m confident that all countries in the world, including those from the global south, are capable of achieving such things. We can all aspire for the moon.