ISRO scripts history; India becomes first country to land on moon’s south pole
PUNE: India made history on Wednesday when it became the first country to land a spacecraft on the MMoo’s south pole. Chandrayaan 3, which means “Mooncraft” in Sanskrit, landed near the south pole, which is still relatively unexplored.
This comes after a Russian probe, Luna-25, crashed in the same area in 2019. The solar-powered Pragyaan rover will be used to explore the surface and send data back to Earth over a two-week period. This mission took much longer than the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 70s, which arrived on the Moon in just a few days.
Vikram, which translates to “valour” in Sanskrit, launched last week from the propulsion module of India’s first lunar lander. It has been sending pictures of the Moon’s surface since August 5, when it entered lunar orbit.
India’s rockets are far less powerful than those used by the US in the 1960s and 1970s, so the probe was forced to circle the Earth multiple times to increase its speed before beginning its lunar mission.
