Congratulations to India for Successfully Landing on the Moon

One hour into Angry Astronauts livestream there was a readout of a successful touchdown of the Indian lunar lander. It successfully landed at the moon’s south pole.

Congratulations to India which joins the USA, China and Soviet Union as countries that had successful unmanned lunar landing missions to the moon.

The Chandrayaan programme (Indian Lunar Exploration Program) is an ongoing series of outer space missions by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) for the exploration of the Moon. The program incorporates a lunar orbiter, an impactor, a soft lander and a rover spacecraft.

There have been three missions so far with a total of two orbiters, landers and rovers each. While the two orbiters were successful, the first lander and rover which were part of the Chandrayaan-2 mission, crashed on the surface. The current Chandrayaan-3 successfully landed on the moon on 23 August 2023. India the first nation to successfully land a spacecraft on the lunar south pole region.

Chandrayaan-1, launched on 22 October 2008 aboard a PSLV-XL rocket, was a big success for ISRO as the Moon Impact Probe, a payload on board the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, discovered water on the Moon. Apart from detecting water the Chandrayaan-1 mission performed several other tasks such as mapping and atmospheric profiling of the Moon.

The primary goals of the Chandrayaan-3 mission encompass three key aspects.
1. Aims to showcase a successful and controlled touchdown on the lunar surface.
2. it intends to demonstrate the mobility of a rover on the Moon’s terrain.
3. it seeks to carry out scientific experiments directly on the lunar surface

The mission should last 14 days, but the rover could continue if the batteries and systems last.

The Lunar Polar Exploration Mission (LUPEX) or Chandrayaan-4 is a planned robotic lunar mission concept by Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) that would send a lunar rover and lander to explore the south pole region of the Moon no earlier than 2026. JAXA is likely to provide the under-development H3 launch vehicle and the rover, while ISRO would be responsible for the lander.