India to Become Fourth Nation to Land on The Moon

India’s space agency recently launched its own probe to explore the southern pole of the Moon and it is calculated to land on its surface at the end of next month, potentially making India the fourth nation to achieve the feat.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) started its lunar exploration programme nearly a decade-and-a-half ago; last Friday, 14 July, ISRO launched the $75-million Chandrayaan-3 – as a follow-on mission to Chandrayaan-2 – as a presentation of the craft’s lander and rover end-to-end capabilities.

Once the landing is successfully completed, the mission will then shift its focus to the Pragyan rover exploring the cold regions of the Moon’s South Pole, which might prove to be difficult as the area has limited sunlight to power the rover’s batteries, along with other terrain and temperature obstacles. Nevertheless, its goals will be to study the surface’s mineral composition and measure moonquakes over the course of 14 days.

The previous Chandrayaan-2 mission was fraught with problems: it endured a crash landing due to miscalculated descent speed parameters, as well as the Vikram rover suffering software issues.

Come the end of August, the world will see if India’s mission to the Moon will establish the country as a major player in space exploration.

Image Credit: Source