Chances of India’s Moon lander awakening following a cold lunar night are “diminishing as time passes”, space researchers from the nation have told the BBC.

Still, they said they would continue to test their luck during the remaining days of the month.

Humans usually stay with each month lasting a little more than 14 days on Earth. On Friday, space agency Isro said it was trying to contact the lander on the meander after the start of the next lunar day, but did not get any signal.

The lander called Vikram, conveying the Pragyaan meanderer in its tummy, landed close to the Moon’s little-investigated south pole in August. They endured fourteen days gathering information and pictures, after which they were placed into ‘rest mode’ at lunar sunset.

The Indian Space Exploration Association (Isro) has said that they hope that the batteries will come back online and the module will be alive when the sun rises on September 22.

On Friday, Isro posted on X (formerly Twitter) that “efforts to establish communication with Vikram lander and Pragyaan rover will continue.” There has been no official update since.

On Monday morning, former Isro chief AS Kiran Kumar told the BBC that “chances of reawakening are dimming with each passing hour”.

“The lander and rover have so many components which may not have survived the frigid temperatures on the Moon,” he said, adding that temperatures near the lunar south pole are known to plunge to -200C to -250C (-328F to -418F) at night.

“Unless the transmitter on the lander comes on, we have no connectivity. It has to tell us that it’s alive. Even if all other sub-systems work, we have no way of knowing that,” he added.

An Isro spokesman added that efforts to contact the lander and rover were continuing.

 

How far has the Pragyan rover travelled since touchdown?

The Vikram lander aboard Chandrayaan-3 landed at the unexplored South Pole on August 23 after a 40-day journey into space. The Pragyan Rover was successfully pulled up and put into sleep mode on September 2 after passing more than 100 meters across the surface of the Moon from the Shiv Shakti point.

“We had a plan to move the rover to almost 300-350 metres. But due to some reasons…the rover has moved 105 metres there,” officials said on Friday.

 

Sleep mode

On September 2, the rover was put into sleep mode; two days later, on September 4, the land is also placed in readiness, after the end of the month. “Vikram will sleep next to Pragyan as soon as the solar power runs out and the battery runs out. Expect to launch them, around September 22, 2023,” ISRO said on September 4.

Before putting them to sleep, the lander’s payload was turned off. However, ISRO retained the recipients of Vikram and Pragyan, in the hope of resuming communication with the two.

Nilesh M. Desai, director of the Center for Space Applications, said that efforts are being made to establish contact with the lander and the rover, adding that this can happen at any time.

 

Extreme cold environment

Once the sun sets on the moon after the end of the month, the temperature on the surface of the moon can drop below -200 degrees Celsius. “The temperature there goes down to minus 200 degrees. In such an environment, there is no guarantee that the battery and electronics will survive, but we did some tests and we get the feeling that they will survive even in such harsh conditions,” ISRO chairman S. Somanath had said earlier.

Since the Chandrayaan-3 mission successfully landed on August 23, Vikram and Pragyan have made several measurements of the situation, mainly to confirm the presence of sulfur on the surface of the moon in this region and to detect small objects. something.

 

Major achievement

The Vikram lander also achieved a remarkable feat by successfully performing the jump test. In order, the lander started its engines, rose about 40 cm and landed safely at a distance of 30 to 40 cm. A successful launch test could have a major impact on future missions aimed at retrieving samples from the Moon, as well as future human missions to the Moon.

If ISRO manages to receive signals and wake up Vikram and Pragyan, it will be a boon for the space agency which hopes to conduct more experiments on the moon.

Chandrayaan-3 was launched on July 14 and landed on the moon on August 23, making India the fourth country to successfully land on the moon and the first country to reach the polar regions of the moon.

 

Chandrayaan-3 is on its journey to the moon

Chandrayaan-3 is the follow-up mission to Chandrayaan-2 to demonstrate endurance to the end to safely land on the lunar surface. It consists of Lander and Rover configurations. It will be LVM3 from SDSC SHAR, Sriharikota. The propulsion module will carry the lander and rover assembly to a 100 km lunar orbit. The propulsion module has the Habitable Planet Earth Spectro-Polarimetry (SHAPE) payload to study spectral and polarimetric measurements of Earth from lunar orbit.

Lander payloads: The Chandra Surface Thermophysics Experiment (ChaSTE) to measure thermal conductivity and temperature; Instrument for Lunar Seismic Services (ILSA) to measure seismicity around the landing site; Langmuir Probe (LP) to measure plasma density and contrast. NASA’s passive laser retroreflector system is suitable for lunar laser studies.

Rover payloads: Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) and Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS) to obtain elemental composition near the crash site.

 

Chandrayaan-3 consists of a Lander Module (LM), Propulsion Module (PM) and Rover to develop and demonstrate new technologies required for interplanetary missions. The lander will be able to land on a specific spot on the moon and launch a rover that will conduct a chemical analysis of the surface of the moon during its orbit. Landers and Rovers have science missions to conduct experiments on the moon. The main function of the PM is to transfer the LM from the launcher pin to the final 100 km polar orbit of the Moon and to separate the LM from the PM. Apart from this, the propulsion module also has a scientific payload as an added value that will be exploited after separation from the Lander module. The launch vehicle identified for Chandrayaan-3 is the LVM3 M4 which will place the embedded module in an elliptical parking space (EPO) measuring ~170 x 36,500 km.

 

The mission objectives of Chandrayaan-3 are:

 

1. To demonstrate a Safe and Soft Landing on the Lunar Surface
2. To demonstrate Rover roving on the moon
3. To conduct in-situ scientific experiments.

 

To achieve the mission objectives, several advanced technologies are present in Lander such as

 

1. Altimeters: Laser & RF based Altimeters
2. Velocimeters: Laser Doppler Velocimeter & Lander Horizontal Velocity Camera
3. Inertial Measurement: Laser Gyro based Inertial referencing and Accelerometer package
4. Propulsion System: 800N Throttleable Liquid Engines, 58N attitude thrusters & Throttleable Engine Control Electronics
5. Navigation, Guidance & Control (NGC): Powered Descent Trajectory design and associate software elements
6. Hazard Detection and Avoidance: Lander Hazard Detection & Avoidance Camera and Processing Algorithm
7. Landing Leg Mechanism

 

To demonstrate the above-mentioned advanced technologies in earth conditions, several Lander special tests have been planned and carried out successfully viz

 

1. Integrated Cold Test – For the demonstration of the Integrated Sensors & Navigation performance test using a helicopter as a test platform
2. Integrated Hot test – For the demonstration of closed-loop performance test with sensors, actuators and NGC using a Tower crane as a test platform
3. Lander Leg mechanism performance test on a lunar simulant test bed simulating different touch-down conditions.

 

“Chandrayaan-3 impels India further into the universe, moving the fantasies and aspirations of every Indian. This great accomplishment highlights the steadfast responsibility of our splendid researchers at ISRO. I show respect for their dauntless soul and creativity”.