India Moon LandingIn Latest Moon Race, India Lands First in Southern Polar Region
Days after a Russian lunar landing failed, India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission is set to begin exploring an area of the moon that has yet to be visited and has water ice that could be a resource for future missions.
transcript
India Successfully Lands Spacecraft on Moon’s Surface
The control room at the Indian Space Research Organization erupted in cheers when the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft landed on the southern polar region of the moon.
The altitude is being brought down from 800 meters. And we are nearing and approaching the lunar surface. He hung up a painting for the exact day. He the. People are applauding. From the Secretary department of space and chairman isro Somnath. I’m confident. That all countries in the world. Including those from the Global South. Are capable of achieving such feats. We can all aspire. Part of the moon and beyond.
Hari Kumar, Alex Travelli, Mujib Mashal and
Hari Kumar and Alex Travelli reported from Bengaluru, India, near the Chandrayaan-3 mission control.
Two visitors from India — a lander named Vikram and a rover named Pragyan — landed in the southern polar region of the moon on Wednesday. The two robots, from a mission named Chandrayaan-3, make India the first country to ever reach this part of the lunar surface in one piece — and only the fourth country ever to land on the moon.
“We have achieved soft landing on the moon,” S. Somanath, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, said after a roar ripped through the ISRO compound just past 6 p.m. local time. “India is on the moon.”
The Indian public already takes great pride in the accomplishments of the nation’s space program, which has orbited the moon and Mars and routinely launches satellites above the Earth with far fewer financial resources than other space-faring nations.
But the achievement of Chandrayaan-3 may be even sweeter, as it comes at a particularly important moment in the South Asian giant’s diplomatic push as an ambitious power on the rise.
transcript
India Successfully Lands Spacecraft on Moon’s Surface
The control room at the Indian Space Research Organization erupted in cheers when the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft landed on the southern polar region of the moon.
The altitude is being brought down from 800 meters. And we are nearing and approaching the lunar surface. He hung up a painting for the exact day. He the. People are applauding. From the Secretary department of space and chairman isro Somnath. I’m confident. That all countries in the world. Including those from the Global South. Are capable of achieving such feats. We can all aspire. Part of the moon and beyond.
Indian officials have been advocating in favor of a multipolar world order in which New Delhi is seen as indispensable to global solutions. In space exploration, as in many other fields, the message of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has been clear: The world will be a fairer place if India takes on a leadership role, even as the world’s most populous nation works to meet its people’s basic needs.
That assertiveness on the world stage is a central campaign message for Mr. Modi, who is up for re-election to a third term early next year. He has frequently fused his image with that of India’s rise as an economic, diplomatic and technological power.
Mr. Modi has been physically present at mission control for other recent moments in India’s space history, including during a successful orbit of Mars in 2014 and a failed moon landing in 2019 where he was seen consoling the scientists and hugging the chief of ISRO, who was weeping.
But the Chandrayaan-3 landing coincided with his trip to South Africa for a meeting of the group of nations known as BRICS. Mr. Modi’s face beamed into the control room in Bengaluru during the landing’s final minutes, where he was split-screen with the animation of the lander.
“Chandrayaan-3’s triumph mirrors the aspirations and capabilities of 1.4 billion Indians,” Mr. Modi said when the landing was complete, declaring the event as “the moment for new, developing India.”
In a country with a deep tradition of science, the excitement and anticipation around the landing provided a rare moment of unity in what has otherwise been fraught times of sectarian tension stoked by divisive policies of Mr. Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist party.
Prayers were offered for the mission’s success at Hindu temples, Sikh Gurdwaras and Muslim mosques. Schools held special ceremonies and organized live viewings of the moon landing, with an official YouTube video of the event racking up tens of millions of views. The police band in the city of Mumbai, India’s commercial and entertainment hub, sent a “special musical tribute” to the scientists, performing a popular patriotic song.
“There is full faith,” the song, in Hindi, says. “We will succeed.”
The Indian mission launched in July, taking a slow, fuel-conscious route toward the moon. But Chandrayaan-3 out-endured its Russian counterpart, Luna-25, which launched 12 days ago. Luna-25 was scheduled to land on the moon on Monday in the same general vicinity as the Indian craft but crashed on Saturday following an engine malfunction.
That India managed to outdo Russia, which as the Soviet Union put the first satellite, man and woman in space, speaks to the diverging fortunes of the two nations’ space programs.
Much of India’s foreign policy in recent decades has been shaped by a delicate balancing act between Washington and Moscow, but the country is grappling more with an increasingly aggressive China at its borders. The two countries’ militaries have been stuck in a standoff in the Himalayas for three years now, and the vulnerability to a threat from China is a major driving factor in India’s calculations.
A shared frustration with Beijing has only increased U.S. and Indian cooperation, including in space, where China is establishing itself in direct competition with the United States.
And with the success of Chandrayaan-3, Mr. Modi can reap benefits in leaning into India’s scientific prowess to “more confidently assert Indian national interest on the world stage,” said Bharat Karnad, an emeritus professor of national security studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.
The control room in Bengaluru became a joyous scene among the engineers, scientists and technicians of the Indian Space Research Organization.
Speaking after the landing, members of the ISRO leadership who managed Chandrayaan-3 made clear that the failure of their last moon landing attempt, in 2019, was a major driving force behind their work.
“From the day we started rebuilding our spacecraft after Chandaryaan-2 experience, it has been breathe in, breathe out Chandrayaan-3 for our team,” said Kalpana Kalahasti, the mission’s associate project director.
Chandrayaan-3 has been orbiting the moon since early August. On Sunday, an engine burn pushed the lander into an elliptical orbit that passed within 15 miles of the surface. On Wednesday, as the spacecraft approached the low point of the orbit, moving at more than 3,700 miles per hour, a preprogrammed sequence of maneuvers commenced.
The craft’s four engines fired again at the start of what ISRO called the “rough braking” portion of the descent, its speed of fall accelerating. After 11.5 minutes, the lander was just over 4.5 miles above the surface and started rotating from a horizontal to a vertical position while continuing its descent.
The spacecraft stopped to hover about 150 yards above the surface for a few seconds, then resumed its downward journey until it settled gently on the surface, about 370 miles from the south pole. The landing sequence took about 19 minutes.
Chandrayaan-3 is a scientific mission, timed for a two-week period when the sun will shine on the landing site and provide energy for the solar-powered lander and rover. The lander and rover will use a range of instruments to make thermal, seismic and mineralogical measurements.
India and ISRO have many other plans afoot.
Although an Indian astronaut flew to orbit on a Soviet spacecraft in 1984, the country has never sent people to space on its own. India is preparing its first astronaut mission, called Gaganyaan. But the project, which aims to send three Indian astronauts to space on the country’s own spacecraft, has faced delays, and ISRO has not announced a date.
The country is also working on launching a solar observatory called Aditya-L1 in early September, and later, an Earth observation satellite built jointly with NASA. India is also planning a follow-up to its recently concluded Mars orbiter mission.
Mr. Somanath has described the current moment as an inflection point, with the country opening its space efforts to private investors after half a century of state monopoly that made advances but at “a shoestring budget mode of working.”
“These are very cost-effective missions,” Mr. Somanath said after the landing. “No one in the world can do it like we do.”
When pressed by reporters about the cost of Chandrayaan-3, Mr. Somanath deflected with laughter: “I won’t disclose such secrets, we don’t want everyone else to become so cost-effective!”
While ISRO will continue exploring the solar system, the accomplishments of India’s private sector may soon garner as much attention. A younger generation of space engineers, inspired by SpaceX, have started going into business on their own. While ISRO’s budget in the past fiscal year was less than $1.5 billion, the size of India’s private space economy is already at least $6 billion and is expected to triple as soon as 2025.
And the pace of change is quickening. Mr. Modi’s government wants India to harness the private sector’s entrepreneurial energy to put more satellites and investment into space — and faster.
Up on the moon Vikram and Pragyan were set to get to work, with the rover possibly rolling onto the lunar surface in the coming hours or sometime on Thursday according to Mr. Somanath. The landing site, on a plateau south of the Manzinus crater and to the west of the Boguslawsky crater, is at about the same latitude as the edge of Antarctica on Earth.
To date, spacecraft have successfully landed on the moon closer to the equator. The polar regions are intriguing because there is frozen water at the bottom of permanently shadowed craters. If such water can be found in sufficient quantities and extracted, astronauts could use it for future space exploration.
The lunar south pole is the intended destination for astronauts who could visit the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program, and also for upcoming Chinese and Russian missions. In the nearer term, as many as three robotic missions, one from Japan and two from private U.S. companies working with NASA, could head to the moon later this year.
But in Bengaluru after the launch, Mr. Somanath hinted that India had its eyes on worlds beyond the moon.
“It is very difficult for any nation to achieve. But we have done so with just two attempts,” he said. “It gives confidence to land on Mars and maybe Venus and other planets, maybe asteroids.”
Reporting on space and astronomy
If you want to send astronauts to the moon, a place with water would be a good destination.
Obviously, humans need to drink water to survive, and water molecules can be split into hydrogen and oxygen. Oxygen provides air to breathe, and hydrogen and oxygen can also be used as rocket propellants to get back home to Earth, or somewhere else in the solar system.
But water is heavy, and lugging it from Earth is expensive and inconvenient.
The rocks brought back by NASA’s Apollo astronauts from 1969 through 1972 suggested that the moon was completely dry. But then planetary scientists started seeing hints of water ice at the bottom of craters in the polar regions where the sun never shines. India’s first lunar orbiter, Chandrayaan-1, collected some of the data that confirmed the presence of water.
The armada of missions now headed to the south pole aim to measure how much water is contained in the shadowed craters and how difficult it would be to extract the water. (It could be very difficult if the water molecules are trapped within minerals and not as ice mixed in with the soil.)
Layers of ice in the craters could also provide a history book of the solar system, much like how ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica provide a record of Earth’s climate.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Editing space and astronomy news.
If you found the journeys of India’s Chandrayaan-3 and Russia’s Luna-25 missions exciting, we have even more lunar adventures for you to follow. One moon mission will be in the news later this week, and there could be even more lunar missions later this year.
The next mission will launch on Friday, Aug. 26. It’s called Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, and comes from Japan’s space agency, JAXA. SLIM aims to test the country’s lunar landing technologies; JAXA has yet to announce a landing date for the mission. Sign up for The Times Space and Astronomy Calendar to get a reminder about the launch and landing of SLIM.
Two American companies are also vying to set down on the lunar surface later this year. They are participants in a program called Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, in which NASA pays private businesses to send experiments to the surface of the moon.
A lander from the first company, Intuitive Machines, of Houston, could launch as early as Nov. 15 on a SpaceX rocket. It will head to the lunar south polar region.
The other lander, from Astrobotic Technology, of Pittsburgh, is to be lofted by the new Vulcan Centaur rocket. It will head to the northeast edge of the Ocean of Storms on the moon’s near side. It had been expected to launch earlier this year, but was delayed after an explosion during a test of a version of a part of the rocket. A launch is expected sometime before the end of this year.
NASA selected the landing sites for both missions based on their science value for the future missions of Artemis, the American program to return astronauts to the moon on a sustainable basis.
Reporting from near mission control in Bengaluru
S. Somanath, the director of the Indian Space Research Organization, had fun deflecting one reporter’s question about the project’s frugal cost. Somanath laughed and said, “I won’t disclose such secrets. We don’t want everyone else to become so cost-effective!” The Chandrayaan-2 was reported to have cost about $46 million, and the Chandrayaan-3 is supposed to have been in a similar range.
Reporting from near mission control in Bengaluru
Speaking to reporters gathered outside Mission Control, the chairman of ISRO, S. Somanath, told us that the lander’s rover, named Pragyaan, would be rolled out in a matter of hours or, maybe, tomorrow. Its sensors, including a laser and an alpha-particle beam, as well as instruments on the Vikram lander, will start relaying data after that.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTReporting from near mission control in Bengaluru
As India looks out into the solar system, its space agency is taking a star turn from an earlier era of space exploration. While the national government looks like a hero, private companies that are increasingly important players in the country’s space program operate quietly behind the scene.
ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organization, was born not long after NASA. In recent years, it has sent robotic orbiters to Mars and the moon and is now preparing to send the first Indian astronauts to space. Based in Bengaluru, the center of the world’s third-largest tech start-up scene, ISRO has bequeathed India a legacy of derring-do in space research.
But the accomplishments of India’s private sector may soon garner as much attention. A younger generation of space engineers, inspired by SpaceX, have started going into business on their own.
And the pace of change is quickening. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government wants India to harness the private sector’s entrepreneurial energy to put more satellites and investment into space, faster. That means relegating ISRO to a lower priority.
Mr. Modi hinted at this ambition in June 2020 when he launched IN-SPACe, a government agency headed by a former chairman of India’s biggest multinational automobile company, and assigned it with “space promotion and authorization.” It has become a one-stop shop for India’s private players, as they sign memorandums of understanding with the government and make plans involving ISRO’s spaceport.
This year Mr. Modi’s government published an official space policy that listed IN-SPACe’s role first and gave it more than twice as many priorities as ISRO, which is now to “focus primarily on research and development” and “expanding the human understanding of outer space.”
Outer space is of less interest to commerce, compared with satellites that exchange information with the Earth’s surface, and so the segment left to ISRO seems to be shrinking. While ISRO’s budget in the past fiscal year was less than $1.5 billion, the size of India’s private space economy is already at least $6 billion, and expected to triple as soon as 2025.
Reporting from New Delhi
S. Somanath, the director of the Indian Space Research Organization, highlights what has been a defining characteristic of India’s space program — that they have achieved a lot with far fewer resources than other major players. “These are very cost effective missions. No one in the world can do it like we do.”
Reporting on space and astronomy
On X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Bill Nelson, administrator of NASA, offered his congratulations to ISRO after India became the fourth nation to successfully soft-land a spacecraft on the moon. “We’re glad to be your partner on this mission!” he wrote. (NASA provided access to its Deep Space Network of radio antenna for communications with India's Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft.)
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTReporting from New Delhi
India’s main opposition party, the Indian National Congress, joins in the celebrations. “We are deeply indebted to the remarkable hard work, unparalleled ingenuity and unflinching dedication of our scientists, space engineers, researchers,” Mallikarjun Kharge, the party’s president, said.
India has a busy decade of space exploration ahead.
S. Somanath, the director of Indian Space Research Organization, has described the current moment as an inflection point, as the country opens its space programs to private investors after half a century of state monopoly that made advances but at “a shoestring budget mode of working.”
A large share of India’s space efforts in the coming years will focus on the moon.
In addition to the scientific results of Chandrayaan-3, India is preparing a joint lunar exploration with Japan, in which India will provide the lander and Japan the launch vehicle and the rover. The robotic mission, known as LUPEX, is also intended for exploring the South Pole of the moon.
Although an Indian astronaut flew to orbit in 1984, the country has never sent humans to space on its own. It is therefore preparing its first astronaut mission to space, called Gaganyaan. But the project, which aims to send three Indian astronauts to space on the country’s own spacecraft, has faced delays, and ISRO has not announced a date for it.
ISRO will first have to conduct a test flight of the Gaganyaan spacecraft with no astronauts aboard. Officials have said they are at the stage of perfecting the crew escape system, and they said this month that they had tested the drogue parachutes, which help stabilize the capsule that the astronauts will ride as they return to Earth.
Additionally, India is preparing for the Aditya-L1 mission, which plans to study the sun, in early September. ISRO officials have said that it will carry seven payloads to study the photosphere chromosphere and the outermost layers of the sun using electromagnetic and particle detectors.
Another mission is the collaborative NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar, or NISAR, which will monitor changes in our planet’s land and ice surfaces from orbit. It is slated to launch from India next year.
The country will also launch a second Mars orbiter mission. The first Mars mission, Mangalyaan, successfully entered the planet’s orbit in 2014 and remained in communication with ISRO until the mission concluded in 2022 when the spacecraft lost power. It made India the first country to achieve Martian orbit on its first attempt, and demonstrated that the country could show scientific prowess even when resources are constrained: The mission’s budget of about $75 million was less than the $100 million budget of the Hollywood space film “Gravity.”
Reporting from Johannesburg
In South Africa, President Cyril Ramaphosa celebrated the successful landing during a summit of the five-member group of nations known as BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. "This, for us as the BRICS family, is a momentous occasion, and we rejoice with you," he said to applause.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTReporting from New Delhi
The ISRO leadership who managed Chandrayaan-3 make clear the failure of their last moon landing attempt, in 2019, was a major driving force. “From the day we started rebuilding our spacecraft after Chandaryaan-2 experience, it has been breathe in breathe out Chandrayaan-3 for our team,” said Kalpana Kalahasti, the mission's associate project director.
Editing space and astronomy news.
The Deep Space Network, a NASA network of large dish antennas, is assisting ISRO in communicating with the ground. Right now, it shows Chandrayaan-3 sending and receiving signals.
Reporting from near mission control in Bengaluru
Modi is speaking: “This is an unprecedented moment," he says, adding, "This is the moment for new, developing India. This is the moment for 1.4 billion” Indians.
Reporting from near mission control in Bengaluru
A genuine roar rips out, from both Mission Control and the media tent and elsewhere in the ISRO compound: the lander has landed! Mr. Modi’s face was streamed on screen, silently smiling, during the final hundred meters’ descent. Now the speeches begin, and everyone is clapping.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTReporting from New Delhi
The landing attempt, in its final minutes, is being viewed by 7.5 million people on ISRO’s youtube channel, and it is broadcast live on Indian news channels.
Once a robotic spacecraft is commanded to land on the moon, there is no turning back.
The task is not easy, but in many ways, the moon is the easiest place in the solar system to land a spacecraft from Earth.
It is the closest destination, less than a quarter-million miles away. It is much smaller than Earth or the other planets, so its gravity is weaker and it is easier to slow spacecraft down.
Unlike Mars, the moon’s atmosphere doesn’t generate searing temperatures on the outside of the spacecraft during descent. Venus is even more hellish, with temperatures close to 900 degrees Fahrenheit at the surface and corrosive sulfuric acid in the atmosphere.
Yet when Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft crashed into the moon on Saturday, two days before a planned landing attempt, it was the latest in a series of impacts, belly flops and hard landings since 1959, when the Soviet Union’s Luna-2 became the first probe to hit the moon.
Some crashes were setbacks. Others were intentional, marking the end of a successful mission. Whatever the cause, space agencies have learned from each collision. Crashes can reveal software glitches or weaknesses in a spacecraft’s design, and they can expose material under the lunar surface for future study.
In the following interactive, take the moon for a spin and see all the places where the United States, the Soviet Union, China, India and others have crashed on the moon:
Reporting on space and astronomy
This is closer to landing than Chandrayaan-2 got.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTReporting from near mission control in Bengaluru
Whoops and cheering as the spacecraft flips from a horizontal to a vertical orientation, at less than 800 meters above the lunar surface.
Reporting from near mission control in Bengaluru
As the spacecraft continues its automated descent to the moon, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has just shown up on screen in mission control in a video call from South Africa, prompting further applause in the room.
Reporting from New Delhi
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in South Africa for a meeting of the BRICS countries during the landing attempt. In 2019, Mr. Modi was at the control room to console the emotional scientists after Chandrayaan-2 failed, hugging the weeping chief of that mission.
Reporting on space and astronomy
Chandrayaan-3 is aiming for a landing site in the moon’s south polar region at about 70 degrees south latitude, or about 370 miles from the south pole. That latitude is about as far south as the edge of Antarctica is on Earth.
The landing site lies on a plateau south of the Manzinus crater and to the west of the Boguslawsky crater. That is roughly in the same neighborhood as where India’s Chandrayaan-2 mission crashed in 2019, and where Russia's Luna-25 spacecraft, which crashed on Saturday, was to set down.
Curtius
Manzinus
Moretus
Chandrayaan-2
crash site
Chandrayaan-3
target landing site
Boguslawsky
South
Pole
Curtius
Manzinus
Chandrayaan-2
crash site
Chandrayaan-3
target landing
site
Boguslawsky
South
Pole
Scientists working on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter described the terrain as “relatively ancient.” The spacecraft is heading to a spot that can be described as flat and boring, compared with more rugged parts of the lunar surface. Mission managers sometimes choose such nondescript environs to increase the chances of a successful landing.
To date, spacecraft have successfully landed on the moon closer to the equator. The polar regions are intriguing because there is frozen water at the bottom of permanently shadowed craters. If such water can be found in sufficient quantities and extracted, astronauts could use it for future space exploration.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTReporting on space and astronomy
There are no second chances now. The spacecraft is essentially doing a controlled fall toward the moon.
Reporting from near mission control in Bengaluru
The powered descent has begun, and the room has burst into applause. Minutes ago, our window into the mission control was a picture of nervous tension. Sitting in front of banks of monitors and keyboards, most of the scientists seemed to be clutching pens and notebooks, with some tapping them in agitation. Now most are breaking into excited smiles.
Reporting on space and astronomy
The crash of the Chandrayaan-2 lander in 2019 was a disappointment to the Indian Space Research Organization — India’s equivalent of NASA. But the mission was not a total loss.
The Chandrayaan-2 orbiter continued to travel around the moon, where its suite of instruments have been making scientific observations.
One instrument on the orbiter identified signs of water, likely trapped in minerals, in parts of the moon far from the polar regions. Further study of the findings may give insights into the moon’s geology, chemical composition and interaction with the solar wind.
If the water can be extracted efficiently, “This is also significant for future planetary exploration for resource utilization,” a team of ISRO researchers wrote in a paper published two years ago.
Using data from another instrument that measured X-rays, scientists produced a map of the abundance of the element sodium on the lunar surface. That helps answer the mystery of sodium atoms that have been observed floating above the surface. The sodium atoms can be knocked off the surface by the bombardment of ions and ultraviolet light from the sun.
Chandrayaan-2 will also have another important job if the Chandrayaan-3 mission succeeds in landing. The older orbiter will be the new lander’s link back home to mission control on Earth.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTReporting from near mission control in Bengaluru
The live video feed from the interior of the Mission Control room has just taken over the large screen in the media area. In Hindi, an announcer welcomes all who have come to watch, from around the world. “All are excited to see the moment of the Chandrayaan landing on the moon.”
Reporting from near mission control in Bengaluru
Excitement is building around the HQ of India’s space agency. The media tent outside ISRO’s Mission Control room in Bengaluru is thronging, with the buzz of human chatter drowning out the hum of the underpowered air-coolers. Banners celebrating the “Chandrayaan Mission Soft Landing Event” have been unfurled and flowers garland an empty lectern before a giant LED screen that glows with a holding pattern.
Reporting on space and astronomy
The Vikram lander and Pragyan rover on Chandrayaan-3 are almost identical to the ones that were aboard Chandrayaan-2 four years ago. Indeed, their names are unchanged.
The Chandrayaan-2 landing attempt on Sept. 6, 2019, appeared to be going well, until the lander was about 1.3 miles above the surface. Then its trajectory diverged from the planned path.
The problems arose because one of the lander’s five engines had thrust that was slightly higher than expected, S. Somanath, the chairman of India’s space agency, said during a news conference last month. With the spacecraft firing its engines to slow down, that meant it slowed more than anticipated.
The spacecraft tried to correct its path, but its software specified limits on how quickly it could turn. And because of the higher thrust, the lander was still some distance from its destination even as it approached the ground.
“The craft is trying to reach there by increasing velocity to reach there, whereas it was not having enough time to,” Mr. Somanath said.
In essence, the spacecraft’s computer was unable to find a solution that could satisfy all of the requirements for how and where it was supposed to land, and as a result, it crashed.
Months later, an amateur internet sleuth used imagery from a NASA spacecraft to locate the crash site, where the debris of the Vikram and Pragyan sit to this day.
Although the design of the Chandrayaan-3 lander is largely the same, engineers made alterations to avoid a repeat of the 2019 crash. Changes include stronger landing legs, more propellant, additional solar cells to gather energy from the sun and improved sensors to measure the altitude.
The software was also fixed so that the spacecraft could turn faster if needed, and the allowed landing area has been expanded.
If they get to the moon, the lander and the rover will use a range of instruments to make thermal, seismic and mineralogical measurements of the area.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTEditing space and astronomy news.
When Russia’s robotic Luna-25 mission launched on Aug. 11, it seemed set on a course to deny the Indian Chandrayaan-3 mission its shot at becoming the first spacecraft to land on the moon successfully this year.
But things turned out differently.
While Chandrayaan-3 took a steady, fuel-saving course to lunar orbit, Luna-25 rushed toward the moon, arriving there only five days after launching.
The Russian vehicle appeared to execute a series of orbital adjustments. Then, on Saturday, disaster struck.
At 2:10 p.m. Moscow time, Luna-25 fired its engines in order to move the spacecraft into an elliptical orbit that would prepare it for landing on Monday. By 2:57 p.m., Russia had lost contact with the spacecraft.
Yury Borisov, the head of Roscosmos, the state corporation that oversees Russia’s space program, described what was said to have gone wrong to the Rossiya 24 TV channel. The engine had been programmed to fire for 84 seconds. Instead, it fired for 127 seconds. That extra push sent the spacecraft on a collision course with the lunar surface. After nearly a day of silence, Roscosmos disclosed the failure on Sunday.
Mr. Borisov did not explain what had caused the engine to fire for too long. In an interview with The Times on Sunday, Natan Eismont, a senior scientist with the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that there had been indications that the engine had performance problems during Luna-25’s mission to the moon. Though not involved in the mission, he suggested that its managers may have needed to take more time before attempting the fateful burn that destroyed the spacecraft.
Reporting from New Delhi
Across India on Wednesday, there was an air of excitement and anticipation.
In a country with a deep tradition of science, schools were holding special ceremonies and organizing live viewings of the moon landing. Prayers were offered for the mission’s success at Hindu temples, Sikh Gurdwaras and Muslim mosques — an important moment of unity in what has otherwise been fraught times of sectarian tension.
Radio jockeys beamed with excitement, repeating the evening landing time before playing joyful songs. Television channels ran countdown clocks and competed in tickers. “INDIA’S MOON SHOT,” read the chyron at the bottom of one channel’s screen.
In Delhi, students made artwork celebrating what they hope will be a historic day — India joining just three other countries in landing on the moon and becoming the first to land in its southern polar region. In Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, the government there has announced that schools would remain open in the evening for students to gather and watch the broadcast from mission control.
“We are very proud to say we are Indian because of our scientists,” one student from the southern city of Hyderabad told a television channel.
The police band in the city of Mumbai, India’s commercial and entertainment hub, sent a “special musical tribute” to the scientists working on the mission. They performed a popular patriotic song, Hum Honge Kaamyab.
“There is full faith,” the song, in Hindi, says. “We will succeed.”
The mood around the landing, which will take place just a little after sunset in India, was captured by the opening line of an article in Times of India.
“When the sun sets on Wednesday, look at the moon: India may be up there.”
India’s recent efforts in space exploration closely mirror the country’s diplomatic push as an ambitious power on the rise.
Indian officials have been advocating in favor of a multipolar world order in which New Delhi is seen as indispensable to global solutions. In space exploration, as in many other fields, the message of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has been clear: The world will be a fairer place if India takes on a leadership role, even as the world’s most populous nation works to meet its people’s basic needs.
That assertiveness on the world stage is a central campaign message for Mr. Modi, who is up for re-election for a third term early next year. He has frequently fused his image with that of India’s rise as an economic, diplomatic and technological power.
“Thanks to our scientists, India has a very rich history in the space sector,” Mr. Modi said after Chandrayaan-3’s launch to the moon last month. “This remarkable mission will carry the hopes and dreams of our nation.”
India aims to be only the fourth country to achieve a moon landing — after the United States, the Soviet Union and China — and the first to do so in the moon’s South Pole region.
Much of India’s foreign policy in recent decades has been shaped by a delicate balancing act between Washington and Moscow, as the country grapples with an increasingly aggressive China at its borders. The two countries’ militaries have been stuck in a standoff in the Himalayas for three years now, and the vulnerability to a threat from China is a major driving factor in India’s calculations.
The common frustration with Beijing has only increased American and Indian cooperation, including in space, where China is establishing itself in direct competition with the United States. Russia’s failed moon landing just days before India’s successful attempt was the latest indication of Moscow’s struggles as a space power.
On the day India is attempting its moon landing, Mr. Modi is in South Africa for a meeting of the group of nations known as BRICS. Much attention will be focused on whether Mr. Modi will sit down for talks on the summit’s sidelines with President Xi Jinping of China, which would be the first proper bilateral discussion between the two leaders since the deadly skirmishes between their militaries in 2020.
At the BRICS summit on Wednesday, Mr. Modi pitched the creation of a consortium for space exploration among the group’s members to “work for global good in areas like space research and weather monitoring.” The suggestion to a group where China and Russia are key members was another indication of India’s constant balancing act — it came just months after Mr. Modi’s government signed on to the U.S.-led Artemis Accords for space exploration.
Bharat Karnad, an emeritus professor of national security studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, said India’s cost-effective approach to space exploration was “making India the launcher of choice for many countries for their low Earth orbit communications satellites.”
But the potential success of Chandrayaan-3 comes at a particularly important moment in the country’s rise, Mr. Karnad said, and Mr. Modi can reap benefits in leaning into India’s scientific prowess to “more confidently assert Indian national interest on the world stage.”