After India scripted history with Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) ambitious third lunar mission, Chandrayaan-3 set to conclude its operations in the next seven days.
This comes as ISRO said that two or the three missions of the Chandrayaan-3 achieved. The first 2 missions demonstrations of a safe and soft landing on the lunar surface, and rover movement on the moon have successful.
While the third mission, which is the in-situ scientific experiments on the moon are currently underway.
The mission made India the fourth country to accomplish a landing on the lunar surface, and the first to reach the unexplored south pole of the moon.
Earlier this week, ISRO released the first observations from the ChaSTE payload onboard Vikram.
ChaSTE is the Chandra’s Surface Thermophysical Experiment, and it measures the temperature profile of the lunar topsoil around the pole. This is done to understand the thermal behaviour of the Moon’s surface.
ISRO also came out with a graph illustrating the temperature variations of the lunar surface/near-surface at various depths, as recorded during the probe’s penetration.
This accounted as the first such profile of the lunar south pole. Detailed observations are underway, the space agency said.
Apart from this, the Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscope instrument on the ‘Pragyan’ rover of Chandrayaan-3 has unambiguously confirmed the presence of sulphur on the lunar surface near south pole, through first-ever in-situ measurements, ISRO said on Tuesday.
The rover also detected aluminium, calcium, iron, chromium, titanium, manganese, silicon and oxygen, as expected.