The next entrant in a parade of robots to the Moon has begun its journey. An Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) rocket took off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre near Chennai, and put the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft on course to the Earth’s largest satellite. Chandrayaan is a Sanskrit word meaning, roughly, “Moon craft.”
The vehicle is expected to arrive in time to make a landing attempt near the South Pole of the Moon no earlier than Aug. 23, and if it succeeds, India will be just the fourth nation to deliver cargo safely to the lunar surface.
This is the second time India has attempted a lunar landing; the first, with the 2019 Chandrayaan-2 mission, ended in a failure due to an error in the software controlling its engines. However, the orbiter from that mission continues to circle the Moon, providing useful data to scientists. The mission that took off today is an attempt to redress that failure, while gathering new data from a host of scientific sensors.
India’s first mission to the Moon, Chandrayaan-1 in 2008, played a big part in generating the current interest in returning to the lunar surface. That mission carried sensors built by NASA, the US space agency, that identified the presence of water. Future missions collected more data that would be used in a 2018 analysis that officially confirmed the presence of water ice in the shadowed regions of the Moon.
The importance of water on the Moon
That ice raised interesting questions for scientists — where did that water come from, anyway? — and opportunities for the first real space economy: Water is a valuable resource in space, and if humans can figure out how to harvest it for drinking, agriculture, and making gaseous oxygen to breathe or rocket fuels like liquid oxygen and hydrogen, it would enable longer-term exploration on the Moon and beyond.
That interest (alongside China’s space exploration plans) helped lay the foundation for the US Artemis program, which plans to deliver the first woman and person of color to the Moon as part of an effort to find lunar ice and determine whether it can really be useful.
That vision has attracted international support, with India signing on to the Artemis Accords, a US proposal for rules of behavior at the Moon, during prime minister Narendra Modi’s recent US visit. The first steps of Artemis will be taken by robotic landers carrying small rovers, like Chandrayaan-3.
The data collected by autonomous reconnaissance missions will help guide where astronauts are ultimately sent. During the Apollo Moon landing program, astronauts visited areas of the Moon that were largely visible from Earth to help ensure their safety; this time around, space agencies want them to visit obscure areas like polar craters, which means gathering more data ahead of time.
Japan, which has also endorsed the Artemis Accords, saw the Tokyo-based company ispace fail at an attempted robotic Moon landing in April. But ispace has plans to try again with its own lander and as part of a consortium with the US company Draper Labs.
The Draper mission is one of several for which NASA has hired private companies to launch Moon landers laden with scientific sensors. The first mission, likely by the company Intuitive Machines, is expected later this year; two more landers, one built by Intuitive Machines and a second by the company Astrobotic, are expected to launch before the end of this year.