Chandrayaan 3 Live: "Pragyan", the Moon Rover of India's Chandrayaan-3, exited the spacecraft Thursday morning to begin its exploration of the lunar surface, ISRO, India's space agency said on messaging platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
"The Ch-3 Rover ramped down from the Lander and India took a walk on the Moon!" the space agency tweeted.
Earlier, ISRO also shared the image captured by the Landing Imager Camera after the landing.
The image shows a portion of Chandrayaan-3's landing site. Seen also is a leg and its accompanying shadow. Chandrayaan-3 chose a relatively flat region on the lunar surface, ISRO said in the accompanying message.
August 23, 2023 07:00 PM (IST): India's unmanned Moon Mission, Chandrayaan-3, Wednesday August 23, 2023 successfully landed on the Lunar South Pole.
"Chandrayaan-3 has successfully soft-landed on the Moon", ISRO announced at 06:04 PM.
"India I reached my destination and you too!" ISRO quoted Chandrayaan-3 as saying from Moon.
With this India has become the first country to land on Moon's little explored South Pole.
[The final moment of Chandrayaan-3 landing on Moon's South Pole.]
04:30 PM (IST): "All set to initiate the Automatic Landing Sequence (ALS)", ISRO said a little while ago as it prepares for the soft landing of Chandrayaan-3 on Moon's South Pole.
"Awaiting the arrival of Lander Module (LM) at the designated point, around 17:44 Hrs IST. Upon receiving the ALS command, the LM activates the throttleable engines for powered descent", the Indian space agency said.
"The mission operations team will keep confirming the sequential execution of commands", it added.
09:15 AM (IST): The Mission is on schedule, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said as Chandrayaan-3 prepares to meet the Earth’s nearest neighbour at 06:04 PM Wednesday August 23, 2023.
“The mission is on schedule. Systems are undergoing regular checks. Smooth sailing is continuing”, ISRO wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“The Mission Operations Complex (MOX) is buzzed with energy and excitement!” it added.
The ISRO has planned a live telecast of the landing operations which will begin at 17:20 Hrs. IST on August 23, 2023.
ISRO had earlier shared the images of the Moon captured by the Lander Position Detection Camera (LPDC) from an altitude of about 70 km, on August 19, 2023.
LPDC images assist the Lander Module in determining its position (latitude and longitude) by matching them against an onboard moon reference map.
The spacecraft with an orbiter, lander and a rover lifted off on 14 July. ISRO has been lifting the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft into orbits farther and farther away from Earth since its launch.
India's unmanned Moon mission, Chandrayaan 3, successfully entered the Moon's orbit on August 06, 2023, marking a significant milestone as India aims a soft landing on the lunar surface today on August 23.
If successful, India will be the first country to land near the Moon’s little-explored South Pole, and only the fourth to achieve a soft landing on the Moon, after the US, the former Soviet Union of Russia and China.
Earlier, Russia's Luna-25 was in a race with India's Chandrayaan-3 to land on the Moon's South Pole. Luna-25 however crashed into the Moon on August 20, 2023 - just a day before its scheduled landing on August 21, 2023.
The Chandrayaan 3 spacecraft has taken much longer to reach the Moon than the manned Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, which arrived in a matter of days.
The Indian rocket used is much less powerful than the United States' Saturn V and instead the probe orbited the earth five or six times elliptically to gain speed, before being sent on a month-long lunar trajectory.
After the spacecraft orbited the Earth for more than a week, it was sent into the translunar orbit on Tuesday through a slingshot maneuver. The third in India’s program of lunar exploration, Chandrayaan-3 is expected to build on the success of its earlier Moon missions.
It comes 13 years after the country’s first Moon mission in 2008, which discovered the presence of water molecules on the parched lunar surface and established that the Moon has an atmosphere during daytime.
Chandrayaan 2, which also comprised an orbiter, a lander and a rover, was launched in July 2019 but it was only partially successful. Its orbiter continues to circle and study the Moon even today, but the lander-rover failed to make a soft landing and crashed during touchdown.
Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Chief Sreedhara Panicker Somanath has said they have carefully studied the data from its crash and carried out simulation exercises to fix the glitches in Chandrayaan-3, which weighs 3,900kg and cost 6.1bn rupees ($75m; £58m).
The lander (called Vikram, after ISRO founder, weighs about 1,500kg and carries within its belly the 26kg rover which is named Pragyaan, the Sanskrit word for wisdom.
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