India has joined the very exclusive club of major space powers by successfully landing a spacecraft on the Moon on Wednesday, a “historic day” for Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The moon landing of the Chandrayaan-3 mission, which means “moon ship” in Sanskrit, occurred at 12:34 GMT near the South Pole of the Moon.
Four years after a failed attempt, the most populous country in the world has joined the very select club of nations that have managed to successfully carry out such an operation.
Russia, heiress of the USSR which had achieved this feat in 1976, has just failed in a new attempt, its Luna-25 probe having crashed in the same region.
Before India, only the Soviet Union, the United States and China had already managed to carry out a controlled moon landing.
“This is a historic day for India’s space sector,” Narendra Modi wrote on social network X (formerly Twitter).
He appeared smiling and waving an Indian flag, on the sidelines of the summit of the emerging powers of the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), meeting at the summit in Johannesburg.
The Russian space agency Roscosmos, which has just recorded a bitter failure at the very moment when Moscow is in the midst of a confrontation with the West over Ukraine, cut a good figure by congratulating “its Indian colleagues”. “The exploration of the Moon is important for all of humanity. In the future, it could become a platform for deep space exploration,” she added in a statement.
“I am so happy, this is the happiest day of my life,” Anil Kumar, a contract employee of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), told AFP.
“I have been praying for the past 48 hours for the moon landing to be a safe one,” he added.
This new stage of the Indian program, in full swing, comes four years after a bitter failure, when contact with the machine was lost shortly before arriving on the Moon.
Designed by ISRO, Chandrayaan-3 includes a landing module called Vikram, meaning “valour” in Sanskrit, and a mobile robot, called Pragyan (“wisdom” in Sanskrit) to explore the surface of the Moon.
This mission, launched six weeks ago, was slower to reach the Moon than the manned American Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, which reached there in a matter of days.
The Indian rocket is indeed much less powerful than Saturn V, that of the American lunar program.
She had to make five or six elliptical orbits around the Earth to gain speed, before being directed towards a lunar trajectory lasting a month.
Vikram detached from its propulsion module last week and has been transmitting images of the lunar surface since entering lunar orbit on August 5.
A solar-powered rover must now explore the lunar surface and transmit data for two weeks.
India’s aerospace program has a relatively modest budget, but one that has been significantly increased since its first attempt to orbit the moon in 2008.
This Indian mission, at a cost of 74.6 million dollars (66.5 million euros), according to the media, much lower than that of other countries, testifies to frugal space engineering.
According to industry experts, India manages to keep costs low by replicating and adapting existing space technology for its own purposes, thanks in part to the abundance of highly skilled engineers who are paid far less than their foreign counterparts.
The previous moon landing attempt in 2019, which coincided with the 50th anniversary of American Neil Armstrong’s first moon landing, had cost $140 million (124 million euros), nearly double the cost of the current mission.
Many of those who had participated in the 2019 attempt were able to participate in this success, which proves that their efforts were not in vain, argued ISRO official S. Somanath.
“They had since gone to such lengths to find out what had gone wrong,” he said. “My congratulations go out to all of these unsung heroes.”
The first Asian country to place a satellite in orbit around Mars in 2014, India is expected to send a three-day manned mission into Earth orbit by next year.
India’s efforts to explore the lunar south pole could make a “very, very important” contribution to scientific knowledge, former ISRO official K. Sivan said.
23/08/2023 17:50:09 Bangalore (Inde) (AFP) © 2023 AFP
