Chandrayaan 3: India's Next Lunar Odyssey

India can be known as a country that has been outstanding in recent space exploration. Their decades of efforts are becoming successful day by day. They gained a lot of experience and data from two lunar exploration missions, and they were able to succeed in their third moon journey as expected. Their third moon mission was named Chandrayaan III. It was similar to Chandrayaan II in that it avoided the omissions of the second mission.

A typical launch profile for the Chandrayaan III mission. It first went into a parking orbit around the Earth and did an Earthbound burn, increasing the ellipticity of that orbit and gradually reaching the Moon. After being captured by the moon's gravity, it orbited there and was gradually reduced by the probe's thrusters to an orbit about 100 km from the moon's surface.

In the first Chandrayaan mission, the Propulsion Probe and the Vikramlander separated from each other. The Vikram lander used its thrusters to decelerate and gradually approach the surface of the Moon. Vikram Lander was able to successfully land on the South Pole of the Moon, making India the first successful soft land country on the South Pole of the Moon. After landing, the ramp of the Vikram lander unfolded to allow the Pragyaan rover to come out. As a special note, the Pragyana rover's wheels include India's national emblem, the Ashoka Pillar, and the logo of ISTO, which were left on the moon's surface as the rover traveled. The Pragyaan rover had lasers and X-ray sensors to probe the lunar surface. With that, Indian scientists were able to identify that the surface of the moon also contains sulfur. The Vikram lander also has several special instruments that collect lunar data. For example, you can take the Chandra surface thermophysical experiment device. This allowed them to test how the temperature of the moon's surface is conducted from the soil to the inside, and in further testing, they found that the temperature of the soil is very low when it goes in about 8 cm, even though it is hotter than the surface of the moon. The ILSA device can be called another device available here. It has become possible to measure the earthquakes or lunar earthquakes that occur on the moon. This has already made it possible to record several moonquakes.

The main purpose of Chandrayaan is to explore the places where water is found on the moon. Water, fuel, and oxygen, which are mainly needed for a Luna space station that can be completed in the future, can be easily produced using water, so like every country, they had their eyes on the south pole of the moon. Because the space economy of the future will always have to acquire its resources.