The Importance Of ISRO's Chandrayaan-3 Landing On The Moon's South Pole

Chandrayaan-3, which will be launched by LVM3 from SDSC SHAR, Sriharikota on July 14, is a follow-on mission to Chandrayaan-2 to demonstrate end-to-end capability in safe landing and roving on the lunar surface.

According to the ISRO, it consists of Lander and Rover configuration. The propulsion module will carry the lander and rover configuration till 100 km lunar orbit. The propulsion module has Spectro-polarimetry of Habitable Planet Earth (SHAPE) payload to study the spectral and Polari metric measurements of Earth from the lunar orbit.

The Importance Of Exploring The Moon's South Pole

The Moon is a valuable source of information about Earth's past. It holds an untouched historical account of the inner Solar system. While there are some existing models, more research is needed to fully comprehend the Moon's origin. Extensive mapping of the lunar surface is crucial for studying its changes and understanding how it formed and evolved. The discovery of water molecules by Chandrayaan-1 necessitated further investigations to determine their distribution on the surface, beneath it, and in the tenuous lunar exosphere, helping us unravel the mystery of water's presence on the Moon.

The Lunar South pole is especially interesting because of the lunar surface area that remains in shadow is much larger than that at the North Pole. There could be a possibility of presence of water in permanently shadowed areas around it. In addition, the South Pole region has craters that are cold traps and contain a fossil record of the early Solar System.

At the South Pole of the Moon, the Sun stays near the horizon, causing temperatures to rise to around 130°F (54°C) when it's shining. Even when the Sun is up, tall mountains create dark shadows, and deep craters remain in perpetual darkness. Certain craters contain permanently shadowed areas that haven't been touched by sunlight for billions of years and reach temperatures as low as -334°F (-203°C).

"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," says planetary geochemist Marc Norman at the Australian National University in Canberra.

A successful landing could also be an important step towards future Indian Moon missions and is seen as a demonstration of India's growing geopolitical ambitions.

It has to be noted that this is India's second mission to the South Pole. The Chandrayaan-1 which was intentionally crashed into the South Pole, had confirmed the presence of water ice in a major discovery in 2008.

Space.com says, "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."