There is no hope of reactivation of Chandrayaan-3’s lander ‘Vikram’ and rover ‘Pragyan’. A well-known space scientist said this on Friday, which signals the possible end of India’s third lunar mission. Space Commission member and former ISRO Chairman AS Kiran Kumar, who was actively associated with the mission, said this while talking to news agency PTI. He said that no, there is no hope of it becoming active again. If this was to happen, it should have happened by now.
The Indian Space Research Organization had said on September 22 that after the start of the new lunar day, efforts have been made to establish contact with the solar powered Vikram lander and Pragyan rover to ascertain the possibility of their reactivation. It had said that at present no signals have been received from them (lander and rover) and efforts to establish contact will continue.
With the Chandrayaan-3 mission, India had created history by making a soft landing in the south pole region of the Moon on August 23 and became the first country in the world to do so. With this, India became the fourth country in the world to do a successful soft landing on the Moon after America, the erstwhile Soviet Union and China.
ISRO had put the lander and rover into sleep mode on September 4 and 2 before nightfall on the Moon, which were expected to be activated again at the next sunrise around September 22. The lander and rover were designed to operate for the duration of one lunar day (about 14 Earth days).
According to ISRO officials, all three objectives of Chandrayaan-3 mission have been achieved which include safe ‘soft landing’ on the lunar surface, demonstration of the lunar rover and scientific experiments on the lunar surface.
Regarding the achievement of Chandrayaan-3 mission, Kiran Kumar said that in the larger sense, what you have definitely achieved is that you have reached an area where no one else has reached and got real data from that area. not done. This is really very useful information. This will benefit subsequent expeditions in terms of knowledge and in terms of planning the activities you want to do in that area.
He also talked about the possibility of ISRO launching a mission to bring back samples from the Moon, but did not give any timeline for launching such a mission. Kumar said that yes definitely all this will be there in future because these are all technology capabilities which you keep developing, now it (Chandrayaan-3) has achieved the soft landing and its subsequent missions will carry material from there. Will be picked up and brought back, they will definitely be all missions.
He said, work will be done on many of these things in future. Plans will be made and then proposals will be made based on the holistic approach of technology development.
Kumar said, it completely depends on how the overall plan is made, and how many resources are made available, so it (timeline for the sample-return mission) is very difficult to tell.