1 yr of Chandrayaan-3: How the mission shaped India’s lunar exploration & what we know about the Moon

ISRO has continued its strides towards future lunar missions and expanded its space exploration programme as the Modi government and private players pump in investments.

People watch a live stream of Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft's landing on the moon, inside an auditorium of Gujarat Science City in Ahmedabad | Reuters

New Delhi: At 6 pm on 23 August 2023—exactly a year ago—ISRO chairperson S. Somanath rose from his seat at Bengaluru’s ISRO Telemetry Tracking and Command Network and smiled beamingly at his still anxious team. The Chandrayaan-3 landing was, by then, not confirmed, but he knew the mission had overcome all possible hurdles.

Just minutes later, as cheers erupted, he announced, “India is on the Moon.”

The statement has elevated India’s position in the global space market. On that day, India not only entered an elite league of only three other countries to have landed on the Moon but also became the first country in the world to land near the lunar south pole.

“Chandrayaan-3 was an outstanding achievement by India. We have some significant findings from our experiments on the Moon, and we will be moving forward to carry out subsequent lunar missions,” Somanath told ThePrint.

Since that momentous landing, ISRO has continued its strides towards future lunar missions. The designs for Chandrayaan-4 and -5 have already been completed and are pending approval from the government.

The space agency is also working on a deadline to set up India’s first space station by 2035 and land the first Indian on the Moon by 2040.

The anniversary of Chandrayaan-3 landing day—which set the foundation stone for these plans—will be celebrated as National Space Day every year. The first such celebration will be on Friday.

The landing moment

The 20 nail-biting minutes before the successful landing of Chandrayaan-3 was preceded by years of preparation in the backdrop of lessons from the failure of the preceding mission—Chandrayaan-2.

In 2019, four years before the successful landing of Chandrayaan-3, ISRO had attempted the Chandrayaan-2 mission. The rocket, however, crashed on the Moon. The systems failed just minutes before the lander would have made a soft landing on the lunar surface, crashing India’s hopes of joining the former USSR, the US and China as a country that has landed on the Moon.

The memories of that failure heightened the tensions before the Chandrayaan-3 landing day last year. However, the efforts towards rectifying past errors also made the victory that followed even sweeter.

“We learnt from our past mistakes and took into account everything that could possibly go wrong. We basically had multiple backups. We were confident that it would be successful,” Somanath said.

Setting the stage for future lunar missions

The Chandrayaan-3 mission not only resulted in some significant in-situ experiments—confirming the presence of significant minerals on the Moon and testing India’s landing and roving capabilities—but also set the stage for testing technology for future interplanetary missions by ISRO.

Senior scientists from ISRO explained that while the Chandrayaan-3 module—consisting of a lander, Vikram, and a rover, Pragyan—carried out its primary experiments, it was also successful in carrying out some “bonus experiments” that were not part of the initial plan. These extra experiments could happen because of the success of the landing under optimum conditions, with the module preserving ample fuel.

On 3 September 2023, the Vikram lander carried out the ‘hop experiment’ in which it fired up its rockets to reach a height of 40cm and landed back. Only a few countries have demonstrated the ability to take off on a celestial object and land again.

Another experiment that the space agency successfully carried out was bringing back the propulsion module of Chandrayaan-3 from the lunar orbit into the Earth’s orbit.

Both these tests established India’s capabilities of not just sending but also bringing back objects safely to Earth in preparation for its return lunar missions in the future.

“The next lunar mission we are preparing for is the sample return mission. Chandrayaan-4 has been designed to collect samples from the Moon and bring them back to Earth, where we can physically study it,” said Shantanu Bhatawdekar, scientific secretary, ISRO.

Significant findings of Chandrayaan-3

Just days before the first anniversary of the Chandrayaan-3 landing, Ahmedabad’s Physical Research Laboratory (PRL)—one of ISRO’s scientific labs that contributed to the mission—released the mission’s findings on 21 August.

One of the key findings is that an ocean of liquid molten rocks once covered the Moon’s south pole, backing a theory that magma formed the surface of the Moon roughly 4.5 billion years ago.

However, this is not the first significant finding from Chandrayaan-3. In one of the experiments by the Pragyan rover, minerals, including Sulphur, were confirmed on the Moon.

Preliminary analysis also found the presence of Aluminium (Al), sulphur (S), calcium (Ca), iron (Fe), chromium (Cr), and titanium (Ti) on the lunar surface. Further measurements have revealed the presence of manganese (Mn), silicon (Si), and oxygen (O).

Chandrayaan-3 also took seismic readings on the Moon, detecting the mild rumble of not just the rover and other scientific instruments probing the Moon’s surface but also what appeared to be a “natural event”.

Paving the way for the space sector’s expansion

The success of Chandrayaan-3 became a watershed moment for India’s space programme. Since then, India has seen some big-ticket missions, and increased pumping of investments into the sector by the government.

The Centre’s New Space Policy, released in 2023, has also opened the doors of the sector to private players. The policy has also demarcated specific roles of stakeholders, including more private partners, in satellite building, technology and infrastructure development.

Agendra Kumar, Managing Director, Esri India, a leading geographic Information System (GIS) solutions provider, said the successful launch of Chandrayaan-3 placed India among an elite group of space-faring nations.

“The accomplishments of being the fourth nation to land on the surface of the Moon, and the first to land near the south pole of the Moon, have been phenomenal, encouraging us to focus on creating a robust space infrastructure and delve deeper into space science and its applications,” Kumar said.

He added, “Earth science data is crucial for enhancing data-driven scientific research, developing effective action plans for mitigating climate change and natural disasters, and educating the next generation to be well-prepared for environmental changes.”

(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)