Chandrayaan-3

Chandrayaan-3

Context:
• As Chandrayaan-3 soft landed on the moon at 6.04 pm on 23rd August India became the first country to land a spacecraft in uncharted territory near the lunar south pole.
• India is only the fourth country in history to complete a soft landing on the Moon after the United States, the Soviet Union and China.

About Chandrayaan-3 mission:
• Chandrayaan-3 is a lunar exploration mission by the Indian Spacе Rеsеarch Organisation (ISRO). Chandrayaan-3 is a follow-on mission to Chandrayaan-2 to demonstrate end-to-end capability in safe landing and roving on the lunar surface.
• Chandrayan-3 consists of Lander Vikram and Rover Pragyaan.
• The mission objectives of Chandrayaan-3 were as follows- i) To demonstrate Safe and Soft Landing on Lunar Surface, ii) To demonstrate Rover roving on the moon and iii) To conduct in-situ scientific experiments.
• The Chandrayaan-3 Mission consists of two modules – The propulsion module (PM) and the Lander module (LM).

Difference between Chandrayaan-2 and Chandrayaan-3

What are the key discoveries made by Chandrayaan-3?
• Pragyan rover has confirmed the existence of sulphur and oxygen on the moon’s surface near the south pole. This discovery was enabled by the Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) instrumentonboard the rover, marking the first in-situ measurements of the lunar surface’s elemental composition in this region.
• Other elements like Aluminum (Al), Calcium (Ca), Iron (Fe), Chromium (Cr), Titanium (Ti), Manganese (Mn), Silicon (Si), and Oxygen (O) are also detected.
• Chandrayaan 3 has measured the soil temperature of the moon and revealed some interesting findings. The temperature ranges from minus 10 degree celsius to around 70 degree-celsius. While minus 10-degree was recorded at 80 mm under the ground 60-degree temperature was recorded at around 20 mm above the ground.