This image of the moon is from NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper on the Indian Space Research Organisation's Chandrayaan-1 mission. It is a three-colour composite of reflected near-infrared radiation from the sun, and illustrates the extent to which different materials are mapped across the side of the moon that faces Earth.
Credit: ISRO/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Brown Univ./USGS Photo
As India's pursuit of space exploration is set to reach a remarkable milestone with the Chandrayaan-3 mission poised to achieve a soft landing on the surface of the Moon on August 23, let us take you back to 2008 during the launch of the Chandrayaan mission, when a crash landing was on the cards.
India had launched the Chandrayaan mission on October 22, 2008. Until then, only four other countries had sent their missions to the Moon — US, Russia, Europe and Japan.
Inside the Chandrayaan spacecraft was what they called the Moon Impact Probe, a 32-kg-probe whose purpose was to crash, as per a report in India Today.
On the night of November 17, 2008, engineers stationed at the control room of ISRO jettisoned the Moon Impact Probe. From a height of 100 kilometers above the lunar surface, the probe began to step away from the Chandrayaan orbiter as its spin-up rockets began to guide its crash on the Moon. As the engines roared, trying to reorient and slow down the crash, the shoe-box-sized probe carried three instruments inside it — a video imaging system, a radar altimeter, and a mass spectrometer.
The purpose of the video imaging system was to take photographs and send them back to Bengaluru while the radar altimeter was designed to track the descent rate of the probe. The mass spectrometer had the responsibility of analysing the lunar atmosphere.
It took nearly 25 minutes for the Moon Impact Probe to meet its fate of hard landing on the surface of the Moon.
This mission helped ISRO make history yet again by crashing spacecraft into a world that was until then a mystery for humans.
While the impact probe was the first to detect water on the surface of the Moon, how is the calculated crash that happened back in 2008 relevant now? The data that was inferred from the three instruments laid the foundation for the Chandrayaan-2 mission as well as the Chandrayaan-3 mission.
On the night of November 14, 2008, Tiranga that was borne by the probe was planted on the Moon forever.