Referring to the expected touchdown, former ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair kept his fingers crossed and said it’s a very complex manoeuvre and one has to be cautious as all systems have to work in unison for its success.
Nair, who headed the space agency when Chandrayaan-1 mission was launched in 2008, said a successful landing would herald a big beginning for ISRO’s next phase of planetary exploration.
“It’s a very complex manoeuvre. We narrowly missed it (soft-landing on the Moon in Chandrayaan-2 mission) in the last two kilometres (above the lunar surface),” he told PTI on Monday.
“So, there are a host of things that have to work in unison…thrusters, sensors, altimeters, computer software and all those things. Any glitch happening anywhere…we can be in trouble,” Nair said.
“We have to be really cautious and watch. Of course, I understand that ISRO has done enough simulations and also redundancies have been built in so that chances of such failure are remote. Still, we have to keep our fingers crossed.”Nair said: “Data we may collect from the (lunar) surface will be useful in identifying some minerals…rare minerals, if at all, helium-3 and so on. Also, try to have some investigations as to what type of setup we can have near the lunar south pole either for exploration or human presence. It (successful soft-landing) is going to be a big beginning for ISRO’s next phase of planetary exploration”.Nair and another former ISRO chairman K Sivan said the failure of Russia’s Luna-25 moon mission would have no impact on Chandrayaan-3.
Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft crashed into the Moon after it spun into an uncontrolled orbit, the country’s Roscosmos space agency said on August 20.
“It does not have any impact,” Sivan, who was heading ISRO when Chandrayaan-2 mission was launched in 2019, told PTI when asked if ISRO would be under additional pressure ahead of the soft-landing following the Russian setback.
“It (Chandrayaan-3 mission) is going on as per plan. It (soft-landing) will be done accordingly,” he said. “We are hoping that this time (unlike Chandrayaan-2) it (touchdown) will be successful”.
Nair dismissed suggestions in some quarters that India and Russia were engaged in a race to the Moon and termed crash-landing of Luna-25 as unfortunate.
“I know the (lander) module. It was ready way back in 2008. When I visited the lab (in Russia), they showed me the module. They didn’t have the resources to fly (then), so, it had been kept in a cold storage for a long time. Now only they had resources (to launch),” he told PTI.
Ruling out any impact on Chandrayaan-3 mission launched on July 14, Nair said India’s venture is totally independent and “we are not dependent on them (Russia)”. Right now, India’s space cooperation with Russia is limited to training of Indian astronauts for the Gaganyaan human space flight mission.
“So, had it (Luna-25) landed, our data and their (Russian) data (collected based on experiments on the Lunar surface) would have been complementary,” he said.
(With PTI inputs)