by India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, which operated a historic landing near the moon’s south pole last August, it barely made any lunar dust during descent thanks to the unique configuration of the engines, a new study reveals. As a result, its cameras obtained clear views of the landing region during the crucial minutes before touchdown, thus capturing images that helped the spacecraft avoid hazardous craters and ultimately land safely.
“When you’re going [to the south pole]the areas of scientific interest are always the hazardous regions,” said Suresh K, a scientist with the Space Applications Center (SAC), a research institute of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) in Gujarat, India.
Speaking on Monday (March 11) at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LSPC), which is taking place this week in Texas, K shared with scientists pre- and post-landing images from the mission, which was operating on the moon for two weeks. before succumbing, as expected, to frigid moonlit night temperatures.
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During descent, spacecraft fire their engines to reduce their speeds in preparation for a soft landing. The exhaust from these engines then hits the surface of the moon, and its powder-like rheolith is usually blown into large dust due to the moon’s low gravity and lack of atmosphere.
However, cameras on board the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft detected the resulting dust plume starting at just 59 feet (18 meters) above the moon’s surface. This represents the least amount of lunar dust ever kicked up during a lunar landing among missions including NASA’s Apollo ones and China’s Chang’e-3 efforts, K said.
He and his colleagues analyzed pre- and post-landing images of the landing area clicked by the lander named Vikram (Sanskrit for “valor”) and a high-resolution camera on board the Chandrayan-2 orbiter, which continued to circle the moon since the Lander-rover duo crash during touchdown in 2019. The sprayed dust resulting from Vikram’s landing settled to about 1,561 square feet (145 square meters) around the lander, as confirmed by a camera on board the Pragyan (Sanskrit for “wisdom”) rover. This is higher than previous estimates of 1,167 square feet (108 square meters), which means that the spacecraft would have displaced much more than 4,500 pounds (2 metric tons) of lunar regolith.
Putting the new results at LPSC on Monday, K attributed the short plume of interesting dust to the lack of a central engine on the spacecraft, resulting in less engine thrust during the descent. Beginning its “rough braking phase” at an orbit 18.6 miles (30 kilometers) above the lunar surface, when the spacecraft reached 0.4 miles (0.8 kilometers) above its targeted landing area, it shut down two of the four 800 engines such a newton. that two diagonal engines remained in operation the whole time until they touched down. The mission used the “less powerful engine so far,” said K. “We have observed much less disturbance on the surface.”
In addition to the diagonal position of the operating engines, the mass of the spacecraft as well as the local properties of the regolith influenced the height of the plume. The Chandrayaan-3 mission team is still analyzing the data in this regard and it is expected to be made public in two months, K told scientists at LPSC on Monday.
Vikram and Pragyan crossed several milestones during their two weeks of operation at the landing site, which was named the Shiv Shakti point (Sanskrit for “Shiva” and “power” respectively). The name has yet to be approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the organization responsible for officially naming celestial bodies and their features.
During lunar nightfall, the Pragyan rover traversed 331 feet (101 meters) on the lunar surface, detected sulfur on the moon, rerouted after encountering a potentially fatal crater and sampled lunar regolith at seven or eight locations, said Pratim Das, the director. science program office at ISRO in Bengaluru.
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The seismometer aboard Vikram sensed several “naturally occurring events” on the moon, including bright vibrations and micrometerite impacts, whose analysis is underway, he said. For the first time, a thermal probe on board sank about 4 inches (10 centimeters) into the surface, capturing the temperature of the lunar soil at various depths.
With the Chandrayaan-3 mission behind it, India is planning its next lunar mission, Chandrayaan-4, which is tentatively scheduled to take off in 2028 and aims to bring moon rocks to Earth. Modi had earlier said that the country should put an astronaut’s aim on the moon by 2040, but ISRO and its partner institutions have not shared details on how they plan to achieve that vision.
