The Chandrayaan-3 probe successfully landed on the moon on Wednesday August 23 under the eyes of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was following the event from Johannesburg where the Brics summit is being held, announced the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). . The Prime Minister spoke of a “day of history”. India thus joins the very exclusive club of major space powers, a few days after the crash of Luna-25, the first probe to be launched by Russia to the Moon since 1976, in the same region of the South Pole, little explored.
This new attempt of the booming Indian program, comes four years after a bitter failure, the ground team having lost contact with the machine shortly before the arrival on the Moon.
Chandrayaan-3, launched six weeks ago, was slower to reach the Moon than the manned US Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, which got there in days. The Indian rocket is indeed much less powerful than the Saturn V, the rocket of the American lunar program. It had to complete five or six elliptical orbits around the Earth to gain speed, before being sent on a month-long lunar trajectory. Vikram detached from its propulsion module last week and has been transmitting images of the Moon’s surface since entering lunar orbit on August 5.
