Year Of The Moon

How India learnt its lessons from the Chandrayaan-2 debacle

- ABHINAV SINGH

On the evening of August 23, when the clock crept four minutes past six, a billion hearts heaved in joy of a kind most had never experienced before. India was on the moon, with Chandrayaan-3 landing on its unexplored south pole. Softly and safely. With that, India became the fourth country to soft-land on the moon and the first to land on its south pole. “This sounds the bugle for a developed India,” said Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who witnessed the landing virtually from Johannesburg where he was attending the BRICS summit.

There has been palpable nervous excitement about the 615-crore mission since Chandrayaan-3’s launch from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota on July 14. But India has been moony about the moon since 2008 when it launched Chandrayaan-1. That was a wet October day, with the northeast monsoon winds having a field day. There were apprehensions that the launch would have to be postponed. But everything went on schedule. And, Chandrayaan-1 successfully orbited the moon. Through its observations, it uncovered evidence of water both on and beneath the lunar surface, sparking fresh geological inquiries. But in the tenth month of its two-year mission, it went radio silent, abruptly ending its exploration. Nonetheless, India’s inaugural lunar mission was a success. A decade later, in 2019, India decided to soft-land on the moon with Chandrayaan-2. It ended in disappointment, as the lander, Vikram, crash-landed due to a last-minute glitch. The lander was trying to make a controlled landing near the moon’s south pole, where scientists expect to find water ice. It started descending at 1:38am on September 7, 2019, and took 10 minutes to slow down from a speed of 1,640m per second to 140m per second. It ceased communication when it was merely 2.1km from the moon’s surface.