Scripting history, India on Wednesday became the fourth country to successfully land on the moon and the first to have done so in the polar region of the moon.
The Chandrayaan-3’s lander module touched the lunar surface at 6.03 p.m., sparking celebrations at the Mission Operations Complex (MOX) in ISRO Telemetry, Tracking, and Command Network (ISTRAC), Bengaluru, as India joined an elite list of countries — the U.S., Russia and China — to achieve this feat. ISRO said a communication link was established between the lander and MOX-ISTRAC and shared images taken by the lander’s horizontal velocity camera during the descent.
Following the landing, President Droupadi Murmu congratulated the ISRO and those associated with the mission. PM Narendra Modi addressed the nation from South Africa, saying India’s successful moon mission was not India’s alone. He added that this success belonged to all humanity and would help the moon missions of other countries.
Several ISRO veterans who played prominent roles in the space agency’s ambitious moon programme over the years described the event as a remarkable achievement. Opposition leaders across the political spectrum also congratulated the ISRO, with Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge calling it “a collective success of every Indian and a testament to the vision of Jawaharlal Nehru.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin was among the first world leaders to congratulate India. In a message to the President and PM, the Russian leader described the success of the mission as proof of the progress that the Indian space programme has made over the decades.
The focus of the mission now moves to the Pragyan rover, which will carry out in-situ chemical analysis of the lunar surface. Here are the details about the crucial experiments that the Pragyan rover is set to carry out. More details on the historic mission, exclusive interviews with ISRO scientists, and in-depth analyses here.
The successful landing has erased the painful memories of the failure of the Chandrayaan-2’s Vikram lander in 2019 and signals the launch of India’s time in space exploration. “The immediate implication of the Chandrayaan-3 lander now sitting on the moon is that ISRO took away the right lessons from the failure of the preceding mission, Chandrayaan-2,” says The Hindu editorial. “Taking a broader view of time, Chandrayaan-3 sits at an important juncture. India is now a member of the Artemis Accords, the U.S.-led multilateral effort to place humans on the moon by 2025 and thereafter to expand human space exploration to the earth’s wider neighbourhood in the solar system. Given the firsts that India has now achieved, it has an opportunity to lead the other Artemis countries interested in maximising the contributions of the space sector to their economies, alongside the U.S.,” the editorial adds.
Meanwhile, the ISRO has a packed schedule after Chandrayaan-3, which includes a mission to study the sun, launching a climate observation satellite, a test vehicle as part of the human space flight programme, and an India-U.S. synthetic aperture radar.
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