India on Wednesday achieved a historic feat in space exploration by landing a robot at the moon’s south pole.
“India is now on the moon,” South African Prime Minister Narendra Modi said as engineers celebrated the moon landing of the country’s Chandrayaan 3 probe at the lunar south pole.
The moon landing made India the first country to land in what is believed to be the most water-rich region of the Moon. The feat surprised other countries, including Russia, which crashed a lander on the moon on Saturday.
Here’s Video of the flow of the successful mission:
Anyone who can mine this water ice and decompose it into oxygen and hydrogen will have future space applications, such as building manned bases on the Moon and producing rocket fuel for missions to Mars and beyond. A way to get resources to further explorations.
Russia was the last country to fail to land on the moon in Antarctica.
The Luna 25 spacecraft fired its engines for too long during maneuvers to move into orbit to propel it into descent, Roscosmos reported.
Authorities found the spacecraft lost contact with it who crashed on the moon on Saturday.
Luna 25 joins the remnants of India’s failed first program.
If it didn’t work the first time, try again.
This moon landing attempt was his second attempt for India.
His space agency sent the first spacecraft to the lunar South Pole in September 2019. The Chandrayaan 2 mission dropping a lander named Vikram to the moon.
The Vikram lander deviated from its intended orbit while descending just 2.1 miles above the lunar surface and lost contact with operators on Earth.
Rajanish Kakade/AP Photo
NASA’s lunar probes later found the remains of Vikram beneath the moon. India made another attempt at Chandrayaan 3 and was successful.
As with any descent or landing, the intact and functional ascent of the spacecraft required hundreds of pre-programmed movements to be executed perfectly in the correct order.
“Spaceflight is hard, but landing on the surface of another planet is one of the hardest things in spaceflight. So it’s the hardest of the hardest,” said NASA’s Braun, who has worked as part of the landing and descent team on Mars missions.