It’s been over two weeks since India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft became the world’s first spacecraft to touch down at the southern lunar pole. Now, the nation’s small Pragyan rover has also completed its initial mission, settling into a slumber that India hopes it will reawake the rover from for future missions.
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The rover has been on the move for two weeks now, documenting evidence of sulfur, iron, oxygen, and other elements on our lunar satellite. Exploration of the Chandrayaan-3’s landing zone is essential to future lunar exploration, too, and overall, the rover has traversed over 100 meters across the moon.
This resounding success is a great showcase of India’s cosmic exploration efforts and the efforts that all of humanity has been making towards exploring the moon and other cosmic bodies out there. From here, the ISRO will continue to explore the cosmos with a recently launched probe set to study the sun and observe solar winds.
Chandrayaan-3 Mission:The Rover completed its assignments.
It is now safely parked and set into Sleep mode.APXS and LIBS payloads are turned off. The Lander transmits data from the payloads to Earth.
Currently, the battery is fully charged.The solar panel is…
— ISRO (@isro) September 2, 2023
The entirety of the Chandrayaan-3 mission has thus far been a huge success, too, especially following the failure of India’s 2019 attempt to put a spacecraft on the lunar surface. Now that the spacecraft has landed with a textbook landing, and the Pragyan rover has accomplished so much so quickly, India could be well on its way to becoming a powerhouse in space exploration.
Of course, NASA still has big plans to explore the Moon, but there is a lot more exploration that needs to be done. Later this decade, Artemis III will aim to return human boots to the lunar satellite. Researchers and astronauts will be able to focus their efforts on exploring a specific area based on the data collected by other spacecraft destined for the moon and Pragyan.
For now, though, we can at least celebrate the success of the Chandrayaan-3 mission and hope that whenever India wakes the Pragyan rover up again, everything comes back online smoothly.
The post India’s Pragyan rover goes to sleep following successful 2-week mission appeared first on BGR.
