India will be 4th nation to achieve ‘soft-landing’ on Moon. Which are others? | Latest News India
India is expecting to join a select group of nations as the fourth country to achieve a successful “soft landing” on the Moon’s surface. With a triumphant landing on Chandrayaan-3 expected on Wednesday, India will also claim the title of being the first nation to reach the challenging south pole of the Moon. The Lander Module is scheduled to touch down at 6.04 pm (IST), assuming all goes as planned. While the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) scientists have engineered a design for a secure soft landing, they remain optimistic that the lander is equipped to manage a “rough landing” if necessary. (Follow LIVE coverage on Chandrayaan-3’s landing here)
“The lander has the capability to hover like a helicopter if a proper spot for landing is not there. There are a lot of boulders and craters in the south pole of the Moon. The surface is very rough. The landing area has been increased from 2.5 kilometres to 4 kilometres,” news agency ANI quoted a former senior advisor for the Satellite Navigation programme at ISRO as saying.
As for which other countries have succeeded in landing on different terrains of the Moon, the former Soviet Union, the United States, and China as the three nations that have achieved successful soft landings on the lunar surface.
Why did this Moon race start?
Back in the 1960s, even before the first Apollo landing of the United States, scientists speculated water presence on the moon. When the Apollo missions brought back samples in the late 1960s and early 1970s, those seemed to be dry.
In 2008, scientists from Brown University of the US looked at those lunar samples again using new methods and found hydrogen inside tiny bits of volcanic glass. Then, in 2009, a NASA’s tool on the ISRO’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft discovered water on the moon’s surface.
During the same year, another NASA spacecraft that hit the moon’s south pole uncovered water ice beneath the surface. An earlier NASA mission in 1998, called the Lunar Prospector, had suggested that the biggest amount of water ice was in the dark craters of the south pole.
The reason for scientists being interested is the old pockets of ice could hold information about the moon’s history, the stuff that comets and asteroids brought to Earth, and where Earth’s oceans came from.
(With Reuters inputs)
