India’s Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander and rover are quickly checking all the boxes of planned tasks for the mission. Time is short, as the duo are expected to last just 14 days on the Moon’s surface, or one lunar day, the amount of time the solar-powered equipment is built to last. Therefore, we likely only have … Continue reading 'So Much to Do, So Little Time. Chandrayaan-3 Makes the Most of Its Time at the Moon’s South Pole'
The 57-lb rover also came upon a 13-foot deep and shadowed crater could have posed an extreme hazard for Pragyan. Thankfully, a team on the ground saw the danger via the rover’s navigation camera. The rover moves at just 10 centimeters per second to allow ground control to monitor the terrain, as well as to minimize any vibrations on the vehicle from the rough lunar terrain.
“On August 27, 2023, the Rover came across a 4-meter diameter crater positioned 3 meters ahead of its location,” ISRO wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “The Rover was commanded to retrace the path. It’s now safely heading on a new path.” The lunar crater the Chandrayaan-3 rover encountered on August 27, 2023, as seen by the navigation camera. Credit: ISRO.
Pragyan is studying the composition of the lunar surface, measuring the presence of water in the regolith, and gathering data on the history of impacts in the region as well as the Moon’s tenuous atmosphere. And the rover hit paydirt. This week, ISRO announced the rover had confirmed the presence of sulfur and several other elements. Pragyan’s laser-induced spectroscope detected the sulfur, as well as aluminum, iron, calcium, chromium, titanium, manganese, oxygen and silicon on the lunar surface.Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscope instrument onboard the Rover unambiguously confirms the presence of Sulphur in the lunar surface near the south pole, through first-ever in-situ measurements.
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