India’s lunar dreams are moving ahead nicely with Chandrayaan-3, and it’s all set to make a soft landing on the Moon’s south pole, come August 23.
Apathukatha Sivathanu Pillai, the former Chief Controller of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), spoke to the press recently and was feeling pretty hopeful about how things are going. He mentioned, “Having transitioned from a near 100 km orbit to 30 km, the descent to the moon is underway. I am confident it will achieve complete success,” in an interview with ANI.
Chandrayaan-3 and India’s energy ambitions
Pillai, who also held positions as the former CEO and MD of BrahMos Aerospace, really drove home the importance of Chandrayaan-3. He made it clear that this mission is a big deal, especially when it comes to figuring out what’s what on the moon – particularly in search of sniffing out Helium-3, which could be a gae changer in the energy industry, down the line.
Helium-3 is an enhanced version of helium with one neutron and two protons around in its nucleus. Although it is not common on Earth, it is found in some trace amounts around natural gas spots. However, it is much more common on the Moon, and other solar stars, thanks to nuclear fusion reactions on them.
Why Helium-3 is growing popular
Helium-3 has captured a lot of attention because of its potential as a fuel for the next level of nuclear fusion reactions. Fusion is the same process that keeps stars, like our sun, shining. If we can achieve this Earth, we might just tap into an energy source that’s basically limitless and doesn’t come with the messy radioactive leftovers that today’s nuclear fission reactions leave behind.
When we talk about fusion, most of the time we’re dealing with hydrogen isotopes like deuterium and tritium. But Helium-3 steps in with its cool neutron-and-proton combo. When mixed with deuterium, Helium-3 functions in a lot cleaner and safer manner than traditional fusion.
A greener energy source with virtually limitless yield
This makes it a greener choice for energy. And on top of that, they give out charged particles that can be turned directly into electricity.
While Helium-3 has major potential for cleaner and greener energy, we’re not quite there yet, at least on Earth. The reactors that can pull off using this fusion are still in their lab phase, and they’ve got a bunch of hurdles to jump.
People are really getting hyped about Helium-3 as an energy superstar, and that excitement has folks talking about digging it up from the moon. Turns out, the moon’s got a higher stash of Helium-3, all thanks to its face-off with the solar wind. This whole moon-mining idea is one of the big reasons why exploring the moon and checking out its resources, like Chandrayaan-3’s doing, is getting a lot of attention as a future energy solution.
Russia was all set to make history with its Luna-25 mission. However, now that Luna-25 has crashed into the moon, India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission’s lander module is now the lone contender in the race to make a soft touch down on south pole of lunar surface.
Russia’s space agency has revealed that their their spacecraft took an unexpected turn and spiralled out of control, before it crashed hard onto the moon’s surface, thereby failing its objectives.
A few years ago, ISRO was in a similar position with the Chandrayaan-2 mission.
Even though we’ve seen successful moon landings more than 20 times before, the process continues to be a massive challenge. In recent history, only China has been able to pull off three solid touchdowns. Most of the successful landings on the moon happened way back in the 1960s and 1970s, back when weren’t aiming for the lunar poles.
Now that Luna’s attempt has crashed, we’ve got the Chandrayaan-3 mission’s lander module leading the lunar touchdown race all by itself. And while there is always a chance that things may go wrong, the folks at ISRO have a genius plan to make sure this time the Vikram lander sticks its landing, no matter what curveballs come its way.
A few days ago, the chairman of ISRO, S Somanath, revealed the steps that they have taken this time around to ensure the Chandrayaan-3’s Vikram lander doesn’t mess up, even if its sensors and engines go awry.
“The entire design of the lander has been made in a manner that makes sure that it would be able to handle failures,” the ISRO chief said. “If everything fails, if all the sensors fail, nothing works, it (Vikram) still will make a soft landing. That’s how it has been designed – provided that the propulsion system works well,” Somanath said.
In several of our reports, we have talked about that pivotal moment when Vikram goes from a horizontal position to a vertical one, as it begins its final descent. That transition is a make-or-break for the entire mission.
The plan is to begin deboosting rapidly as it makes its way to the surface. At a certain point, the lander will separate from the lander propulsion module, but this has to be done at a critical point – do it too early, and the lander module may get imbalanced and tilt over. Do it too late, and it may not slow down enough for a soft touch down and may slam onto the moon, damaging some of the more delicate components.
Russia made a brave attempt to go to a yet unexplored region of the moon, after nearly 50 decades. As fate would have had it, the mission, Luna-25, crashed on the moon, after it spiralled out of control.
The director of Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Dr Annapurni Subramaniam made a statement, saying “A very big credential regarding space exploration 50 years ago and they attempted this after about 50 years.”
She added, “We hope that they still continue to have the knowledge, capacity and experience and that they will be able to solve it and go ahead with their Luna-26 and Luna-27 missions as planned.”
#WATCH | Bengaluru: On Russia Luna-25 crash, Director, Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Annapurni Subramaniam says, “A very big credential regarding space exploration 50 years ago and they attempted this after about 50 years. We hope that they still continue to have the… pic.twitter.com/79L1VYRBkC
— ANI (@ANI) August 21, 2023
Russia, then the USSR, was a force to be reckoned with about 50 years ago when we speak about space exploration. From sending the first human to space to launching the first man made orbiting satellite into space, Russia was making massive strides in space exploration. Even its last mission to the moon, the Luna 24 was a massive success, which took place at the height of the USSR’s cold war with the US. The Luna 24 brought back a pretty sizeable chunk of Moon rocks back to the Earth.
The Luna 24 was particularly significant, as it was one of the first missions to the Moon that spoke of the possibility of water being present on the lunar surface.
In February 1978, a team of Soviet scientists at the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytic Chemistry published a paper claiming that they had definitively found traces of water in the samples from Luna 24.
The Luna 25’s mission was to expand our understanding of the Moon’s south pole region. It was equipped with a suite of advanced scientific instruments, including specially designed cameras, spectrometers, and drilling equipment. It was supposed to study the Moon’s surface composition, geology, and potential ice deposits.
