Geeta Pandey - BBC News, Delhi
Wed, August 30, 2023
A photo of the Vikram lander taken by Pragyaan rover on Wednesday morning
Exactly a week ago, India set down a robotic probe on the Moon, becoming the first country to land near the lunar south pole.
Chandrayaan-3's Vikram lander - carrying a rover in its belly - touched down on the lunar soil after a 20-minute, nail-biting finale watched by millions of people across the world.
Hours later, the Pragyaan rover - Pragyaan is the Sanskrit word for wisdom - exited the lander and took its first steps on the Moon.
The Indian space agency has been providing regular updates on the rover's findings, the photos it's taking, distance it is covering and how it is negotiating the obstacles in its path.
Here's a look at the highlights from the first week of the rover's Moonwalk:
Say cheese
Until now, we had only seen videos and images of the rover, taken by the lander.
But on Wednesday morning, Pragyaan turned its camera on its parent - the Vikram lander - and said, "Smile, please!"
The black-and-white image shows Vikram with all its four legs firmly planted on the lunar ground.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) said this "image of the mission" was taken by the navigation camera onboard the rover.
Sulphur finds
Over the past few days, the rover has been hard at work.
On Tuesday evening, Isro said that a laser detector onboard had made "the first-ever in-situ - in the original space - measurements on the elemental composition of the surface near the south pole" and found a host of chemicals, including sulphur and oxygen, on lunar soil.
The instrument "unambiguously confirms" the presence of sulphur, it said, adding that preliminary analysis also "unveiled the presence of aluminium, calcium, iron, chromium, titanium, manganese, silicon and oxygen".
"A thorough investigation regarding the presence of hydrogen is underway," it added.
Noah Petro, a project scientist at Nasa, told the BBC's Soutik Biswas that it's been known from the 1970s - from the Apollo and Luna samples - that sulphur is present in the lunar soil.
But he described Pragyaan's findings as "a tremendous accomplishment".
"I think Isro is highlighting that it's in-situ - so it's important to have measured sulphur on the lunar surface. Sulphur is a volatile element if it's not inside a mineral. So, if it's not part of a crystal, it's very cool to see it measured on the surface," he added.
Negotiating craters
As the rover roams around the mission's landing point - now named the Shiv Shakti Point - in what Isro has described as "the pursuit of lunar secrets", it has covered quite a distance. It has also had to change course to stay safe because of deep craters.
Two days after the landing, Isro said Pragyaan - which travels at a speed of 1cm per second - had "successfully traversed a distance of 8 metres (26ft)".
The crater India's rover encountered during its Moonwalk
The rover reversed its path after encountering a crater
It added that on Sunday, the rover had encountered a crater with a diameter of four metres. But it was spotted well in time - when Pragyaan was about three metres away.
"It was commanded to retrace the path. It's now safely heading on a new path," Isro added.
Photos released by the space agency show the crater and the footprints of the rover on the lunar soil - going forward and returning.
Taking the Moon's temperature
On Sunday, Isro said that they had received the first set of data about the temperatures on the lunar topsoil and up to the depth of 10cm below the surface from a probe onboard Vikram lander.
The probe - called the ChaSTE experiment, or Chandra's Surface Thermophysical Experiment - is fitted with 10 individual temperature sensors and has thrown up some interesting results.
A graphic posted on X (formerly Twitter) by Isro showed a sharp difference in temperatures just above and below the surface.
While the temperature on the surface was nearly 60C, it plummeted sharply below the surface, dropping to -10C at 80mm (just about 3 inches) below the ground.
An Isro scientist told the news agency PTI that he was "surprised" by the temperature fluctuation. "We all believed that the temperature could be somewhere around 20C to 30C on the surface but it is surprisingly higher than what we had expected," BH Darukesha said.
The Moon, however, is known for harbouring extreme temperatures - according to Nasa, daytime temperatures near the lunar equator reach a boiling 250F (120C), while night temperatures can plunge to -208F (-130C).
The Moon's poles, it says, are even colder - one crater near the north pole recorded -410F (-250C) which makes it the coldest temperature measured anywhere in the entire solar system. Equally cold temperatures have been recorded at some of the craters which remain permanently in the shadows in the south pole
BBC News India
India isn’t ‘wasting’ aid on its space programme
Vikram Doraiswami
Thu, August 31, 2023
Chandrayaan-3 lifting off from the Launch Vehicle Mark-III Mission 4
India’s third moon-shot mission – Chandrayaan-3 – touched down on the moon’s south pole last week, landing not just a rover, but also human dreams collected over the ages. Space exploration inspires us because it is genuinely exciting to see mankind’s boundaries being extended. And so the excitement in India, as well as the outpouring of goodwill from thousands in the UK – including dignitaries speaking for His Majesty’s Government – has been hugely heartwarming.
And yet, there has been carping in influential media outlets about why the UK’s aid recipients still include India, or worse, that a developing country such as India “wastes” money on space. This is surprising, not least because this “aid” is not at India’s request. Nor is any going to the Indian state, either.
First, India has stated that, while we welcome bilateral and plurilateral partnership with the UK to meet our collective global goals, “aid” is not needed. Such funding that continues to flow to India is thus only to non-governmental entities selected directly and solely by the UK Government. And in any case, the direction and context of such spending, as described in the Government’s response to the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, is that this is essentially an effort to support Sustainable Development Goals, or promote UK business in India, through actors of the UK’s own choice. So the benefit and beneficiaries of this spending are in line with your own political priorities, and not at our request.
Looking at the sums required to ensure, for instance, sustainable energy transitions in a country of India’s size, the actual amount of funds being so disbursed is also genuinely small. At best, it could help catalyse large doses of funding through public-private partnerships.
As to “wasting” money on space research: our space programme is a value-for-money proposition. Put it this way: the current moon mission had a programme budget of $75 million. Even if there are overruns, it is well below what was spent on the Hollywood film Avengers: Endgame, which reportedly had a budget of $356 million.
Our space programme also delivers hugely valuable developmental services. As prime minister Modi said at our space headquarters in Bengaluru on August 26, more than space exploration, data from the space programme has been directly used by farmers, fishing communities, water departments, meteorologists, and now for the design and monitoring of infrastructure projects. Our indigenously built satellites have provided India with state-of-the-art remote sensing services for all these needs, as well as communications support for education and healthcare, well before the internet became ubiquitous.
And so to answer why we spend on space “instead” of poverty alleviation, it might surprise some to know that we can actually walk while chewing gum. Here’s how: our space programme has launched 389 satellites, earning some £320 million over the past nine years. While space earns revenue and saves us money, we have also managed to lift more than 450 million people out of multidimensional poverty since 2006. In certifying this, the UN Development Programme noted that, in this same period, incidence of poverty fell from 55 per cent of the population to 16 per cent; the proportion of people with lack of access to electricity fell from 24 to 2 per cent; sanitation deprivation fell from 50 to 11 per cent; and lack of potable water access fell from 16 to 3 per cent. In short, deprivation rates fell in every sector, and in every region.
The right question is to ask precisely why there was so much deprivation in India to begin with. It is instructive to see where we were on freedom from British rule in 1947: 90 per cent of India’s 370 million population at the time subsisted below the poverty line, living short, precarious lives for an average of 30 years. With our freedom we inherited abysmal levels of poverty, enormous human developmental challenges, a violently divided nation, little modern infrastructure, especially in rural areas, and of course, no space programme! All these modern requirements have been built over the decades, while lifting millions out of poverty. This effort in particular has been turbo-charged in the past decade.
So to the critics: to rephrase Shakespeare’s immortal quote about stars and the faults within ourselves, perhaps today, if humankind is indeed destined to reach for the stars, we need only reach within our better selves.
Vikram Doraiswami is India’s High Commissioner to the UK
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