The Moon’s little-explored south pole is where India’s third lunar mission plans to land a lander and rover on August 23.
The lander will split from the propulsion module that brought it relatively close to the Moon on Thursday, and “they will begin their separate journeys.”
But if a new Russian mission beats Chandrayaan-3 to the south pole, Chandrayaan-3 might not be the first to set foot there.
A day or two earlier landing is anticipated for Luna-25, which was launched last week.
Chandrayaan-3 will have to settle with coming in second place if the Russian spacecraft, which is doing its first Moon trip in nearly 50 years, when Russia was still a part of the Soviet Union, is successful in landing softly on August 21 or 22 as scheduled.
But after the US, the former Soviet Union, and China, India will still be the only other nation to make a gentle landing on the Moon.
Luna-25 was launched by Russia on August 10 but, thanks to the far more potent Soyuz rocket, it quickly escaped Earth’s gravity and arrived in lunar orbit on Wednesday, according to the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft was launched on July 14 but made several Earth orbits before entering lunar orbit on August 5. Since then, the spacecraft has been circling the Moon in preparation for the landing.
There has been talk of a “mini space race” between the two Moon-bound spacecraft.
However, the Indian Space Research Agency (Isro) told the BBC that there will be a new’meeting place’ on the Moon and that it is not a competition.
An Isro official assured me that the organisation has never participated in any race since its founding in the 1960s.
“We designed the mission based on the spacecraft’s readiness and the technical window that was open for reaching the far side of the Moon. A long time ago, a mission called Luna-25 was planned. They must also have certain technological considerations, about which we are unsure.
The third mission in India’s lunar exploration effort, Chandrayaan-3, is anticipated to build on the accomplishments of its predecessors.
It was launched 13 years after the nation’s initial Moon mission in 2008, which showed that the Moon has an atmosphere during the daylight and that there are water molecules on its dry surface.
The July 2019 launch of Chandrayaan-2, which also included an orbiter, a lander, and a rover, was only partially successful. Even now, the orbiter is still circling and studying the Moon, but the lander-rover crashed upon touchdown since it was unable to make a soft landing.
Isro chief Sreedhara Panicker Somanath claimed that to solve the flaws in Chandrayaan-3, which weighs 3,900 kg and cost 6.1 billion rupees ($75 million; £58 million), simulation exercises had been performed.
The 26 kg rover, named Pragyaan, which means knowledge in Sanskrit, is carried within the lander module, which is named Vikram after the founder of Isro and weighs roughly 1,500 kg.
Scientists carefully decreased the rocket’s speed once the spacecraft entered the Moon’s orbit to provide a smooth landing for Vikram.
Mylswamy Annadurai, commander of India’s first lunar mission, told the BBC that once the lander module separated from the propulsion module on Thursday, it will do two manoeuvres over the following several days, coming closer to the Moon with each one until it reached an orbit of 30 km by 100 km every day before landing.
The six-wheeled rover will crawl out after the dust has settled, which will take a few hours after landing, and explore the Moon’s surface while collecting vital information and photographs that will be transmitted back to Earth for processing.
The rover is equipped with instruments that will be used to learn more about the Moon’s surface’s physical features, the atmosphere close to the surface, and the tectonic activity to investigate what occurs underneath the surface.
The south pole of the Moon is still mostly unexplored, and because it has a larger surface area that is always in shadow than the north pole, scientists believe that there may be water present there.
Finding water ice is one of the main objectives of Chandrayaan-3 and Luna-25, as it may one day allow for future human habitation on the Moon, according to scientists. Additionally, it might be used to refuel spaceships travelling to Mars and other far-off planets.