India has done it.

The Indian Space Research Organisation successfully pulled off a soft-landing on the Moon as its Chandrayaan-3 module comprising its lander Vikram and rover Pragyan touched down near the lunar south pole on Wednesday evening.

India joins the elite club of the United States, China and the former Soviet Union of countries who have managed to carry out a soft-landing.

Even better, India is the first country to reach the region near the Moon’s south pole.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, addressing the nation after the successful soft-landing, said, “India’s successful moon mission is not India’s alone. This is a year in which the world is witnessing India’s G20 presidency. Our approach of one earth, one family, one future is resonating across the globe.”

“No other country has been able to land on this side of Moon before; this will change all narratives and stories about Moon. I heartily congratulate ISRO, its scientists for this unprecedented feat,” Modi added.

Perhaps no other country has been paying closer attention to India’s success than the United States – which made history by putting a man on the Moon over half a century ago.

Let’s take a closer look at why:

Artemis Accords

ISRO’s success comes months after India, during Modi’s first state visit to the United States, joined the Artemis Accords.

The Artemis Accords is a non-binding multilateral arrangement between the American government and other world governments to return humans to the Moon by 2025.

“India joins 26 other countries committed to peaceful, sustainable, and transparent cooperation that will enable exploration of the Moon, Mars, and beyond. NASA will provide advanced training to Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) astronauts with the goal of launching a joint effort to the International Space Station in 2024,” a White House statement said.

“India has signed the Artemis Accords, which advance a common vision of space exploration for the benefit of all humankind,” the United States added.

The Moon’s south pole

The ISRO has now put India in an exclusive club of one – to successfully land on the Moon’s unexplored south pole.

The Moon’s south pole region has been chosen because the Lunar south pole remains much larger than that at the north pole. There could be a possibility of presence of water in permanently shadowed areas around it.

The rover, after the soft-landing, would come out of the lander module and study the surface of the moon through its payloads APXS – Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer – to derive the chemical composition and infer mineralogical composition to further enhance understanding of lunar surface.

The rover, which has a mission life of 1 lunar day (14 Earth days) also has another payload Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS) to determine the elemental composition of lunar soil and rocks around the lunar landing site, ISRO said.

India, like it did in the past, could make some momentous discovery.

As per The Statesman, ISRO in 2008 intentionally crashed the Chandrayaan-1 into the south pole – which in a massive development confirmed the presence of water ice.

As Space.com noted, “Chandrayaan-1, which launched in October 2008, sent a moon orbiter aloft in India’s first-ever deep-space effort. The orbiter carried a 64-pound (29 kilograms) impactor probe that slammed hard (but intentionally) into the lunar surface near the south pole. The impactor detected water ice just before it crashed, a discovery matched by a NASA instrument aboard the Chandrayaan-1 orbiter called the Moon Mineralogy Mapper.”

Chandrayaan-2, which took off on 22 July in 2019, was India’s first attempt to carry out a soft-landing on the Moon.

During that mission, the lander instead of making a soft landing crashed on the surface.

NASA eyes human mission to Moon’s south pole

According to Sci Tech Daily website, NASA in 2025 plans to send the first human beings to explore the region near the Moon’s south pole.

According to the NASA website, the agency has “its sights set on locations around the south pole for the Artemis era of human lunar exploration.”

“Extreme, contrasting conditions make it a challenging location for Earthlings to land, live, and work, but the region’s unique characteristics hold promise for unprecedented deep space scientific discoveries. Using advanced technology including autonomous systems, the crew inside of Starship will land at a carefully selected site within a 100-meter radius,” the website states.

“The south pole region has very different geology from the region around the [US] Apollo missions, so Chandrayaan-3 will provide a close-up view of an entirely new region of the Moon,” planetary geochemist Marc Norman, from the Australian National University of Canberra, told Nature.

“Similar measurements were made by the US Apollo and Chinese Chang’e missions when they landed nearer the Moon’s equator, but this will be the first analysis of the environment at one of the poles. Thermal conductivity in particular depends on the grain size and packing of regolith — the surface layer of loose rubble — and so will be useful for characterising the landing site”, Norman added.

Nature noted that such data cannot be observed from orbit.

With inputs from agencies