Chandrayaan -3s Vikram Lander on the Luner suface captured by rover Pragyan
Hours before it went to sleep, Chandrayaan-3’s Vikram Lander accomplished an extraordinary feat: it fired its engines on command and performed a lift-off on the lunar surface! It soared to a height of some 40 centimetres and immediately made another soft-landing near the Moon’s South Pole.
Unlike prior mission operations, this ‘hop’ was an on-the-spot challenge, meaning that it was never tested on the ground but performed on the Moon directly, Chandrayaan-3 project director P Veeramuthuvel told TOI.
Earlier, P Veeramuthuvel had also mentioned how this tiny but historic jump was a ‘precursor for our sample return mission’.
And now, speculation of this short hop spurring ISRO’s next giant lunar leap has skyrocketed, after an anonymous ISRO official revealed that the Indian space agency will be designing programs to bring back lunar samples to Earth based on findings from Chandrayan -3 — specifically Vikram’s hop experiment!
“There is no definitive timeline for this yet, but we are working on developing our systems in a way that it can undertake a return flight. The hop experiment was only a demonstration of the larger plan,” the official told Hindustan Times.
In the past, several Moon missions — from the Soviet Luna programme and NASA’s Apollo to the latest Chang’e 5 mission — have returned to Earth with lunar rocks and soil. Notably, NASA’s Surveyor-6 executed a lunar hop in the 1960s, paving the way for subsequent sample return missions. And it looks like ISRO is planning to enter this coveted league next.
Although the exact timing of India’s lunar round trip remains uncertain, a series of ambitious missions are currently in the works.
Among these is the Indo-Japan collaboration LUPEX, short for Lunar Polar Exploration Mission, which is slated for a 2025 launch. Apart from looking for the Moon’s water, this mission also aims to assess the feasibility of setting up a lunar base.
Moreover, the successful return and recovery of NASA’s first ever and possibly the largest ever sample from Asteroid Bennu has sparked a new-found excitement about India’s endeavour in this field.
With the world eagerly awaiting Vikram and Pragyan’s awakening, ISRO has decided to wait until the next lunar sunset to revive the duo. Who knows, if Vikram awakens, it might excitedly execute another remarkable lunar leap!