India managed to bring an unmanned rocket into orbit of the Moon on Saturday, hoping to join the very exclusive club of countries that have succeeded in a controlled moon landing, four years after a failed attempt.
“Chandrayaan-3 has entered the orbit of the Moon,” the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) announced on Facebook, more than three weeks after its launch on July 14 from Sriharikota in the southern state. of Andhra Pradesh.
The mission should, if all goes according to plan, land near the unexplored south pole of the Moon between August 23 and 24.
So far, only Russia, the United States and China have managed a controlled moon landing.
This new attempt of the Indian program, in full swing, comes four years after a bitter failure, the ground team having lost contact shortly before the arrival on the Moon.
Developed by ISRO, Chandrayaan-3 includes a landing module called Vikram, which means “valour” in Sanskrit, and a rover, a mobile robot, called Pragyan (“wisdom” in Sanskrit), which will explore the surface of the Moon.
Chandrayaan-3 took much longer to reach the Moon than the manned Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, which arrived within days.
The Indian rocket is indeed much less powerful than the Saturn V, the rocket of the American Apollo lunar program. She had to make five or six elliptical orbits around the Earth to gain speed, before being sent on a lunar trajectory lasting a month.
This mission represents a cost of 74.6 million dollars (66.5 million euros), according to the media.
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.
Since the launch of a probe into orbit around the moon in 2008, India’s space program has grown considerably.
In 2014, India became the first Asian country to put a satellite into orbit around Mars and three years later launched 104 satellites in a single mission.
By next year, the Asian giant should launch a three-day manned mission in orbit around the Earth.
In 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi praised India for joining the “space superpowers” club after shooting down a low-orbiting satellite with a missile, but the country drew criticism for the amount of “waste spatial” thus generated.
India is also striving to increase its share of the commercial space market in the world, which is currently 2%, thanks to much lower costs than its competitors.
China has injected billions of dollars into its space programs with the aim of catching up with the United States and Russia. She hopes to send a manned mission to the Moon by 2030 and aims to build a base there.
05/08/2023 17:57:10 – New Delhi (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
