Restoration of India lander doubtful as lunar darkness approaches

Indian space scientists are saying it’s unlikely that the Moon lander will wake up as a new lunar night starts.

The Indian space agency Isro has not agreed if they will keep trying to communicate with the lander and rover. They said that the lander and rover finished everything they were supposed to do and even more.

Isro wished that the Vikram lander would start working again on or after 22 September when a new day on the moon started.

A day and night on the Moon each takes a little more than 14 days on Earth.

The spacecraft landed near the Moon’s south pole on August 23rd. It had a rover called Pragyaan inside. They worked for two weeks collecting information and pictures. Then, they were turned off when it became nighttime on the moon.

They picked a specific landing date that matched the lunar daybreak because they needed sunlight to charge and work properly.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) said at first that the lander and the rover would only work for 14 days on Earth. However, they later hoped that the batteries would recharge and the modules would wake up again when the sun rises on the moon.

But as more time passed without a signal from the lander, scientists told the BBC that the chances of it waking up were getting less and less likely.

G Madhavan Nair said on Friday that it’s very unlikely that the Vikram lander will start working because it hasn’t sent any messages yet.

“He said the equipment is not made to handle the very cold weather on the Moon, where temperatures at night can drop to as low as -200C to -250C (-328F to -418F). ”

Mylswamy Annadurai, the leader of India’s initial Moon expedition, said to the BBC that they will continue trying to reach the Vikram lander occasionally, but they will have to lessen their efforts.

We cannot keep resources locked up for too long to activate the Moon lander. We need to transfer them to monitor Aditya L-1, which is India’s first mission to study the Sun. “Now we have to keep an eye on Aditya and focus our attention on him,” he said.

“We need to recognize that it exists and continue forward,” he said.

Isro has been giving regular information about the lander and rover’s actions and discoveries, and they have also shared pictures taken by them.

It also said the mission achieved all of its goals. A few days ago, the person in charge of the Chandrayaan-3 project said that the lander did an unplanned hop experiment on the Moon and went beyond what it was supposed to do.

India achieved a significant milestone with its Chandrayaan-3 mission by becoming the first country to successfully land a spacecraft near the southernmost part of the moon.

It also became part of a special group of countries that successfully landed softly on the Moon. This group includes the US, the former Soviet Union, and China.