India's lunar mission Chandrayaan-2 marked the first anniversary of its launch on Wednesday. The payloads are performing well, and the lunar surface is being extensively examined, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said in a statement. "Extensive data has been acquired from Chandrayaan-2 payloads and parameters are being derived for presence of water-ice in the polar regions, X-ray based and infrared spectroscopic mineral information and mid and high latitude presence of Argon-40, a condensable gas on the moon," ISRO stated. The data from Chandrayaan-2 will be publicly released from October, it added.
A GSLV-Mk-III rocket, carrying the orbiter, lander Vikram and rover Pragyaan, took off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh on July 22, 2019. The 3,850-kg Chandrayaan-2 aimed at landing the rover on unchartered Lunar South Pole. The spacecraft was inserted into lunar orbit on August 20, 2019. The Chandrayaan-2 mission was India's first attempt to land on the lunar surface.
However, the lander Vikram hard-landed in September. Vikram, with rover Pragyan housed inside it, hit the lunar surface after communication with the ground stations was lost during its final descent, just 2.1km above the surface. The lander was supposed to analyse the unexplored part of the moon's terrain and send back data for 14 days. It was later revealed that a last-minute software glitch led to the failure of the lander mission. It crash-landed on the moon's surface after its guidance software went kaput.
However, the orbiter, which is still in the lunar orbit, has a mission life of seven years. As Chandrayaan-2 makes its polar orbit over the time period, the Imaging IR Spectroscope (IIRS) will take detailed mineralogical and volatile measurements of the moon in the spectral range of 0.8 to 5 micrometres at a resolution of around 20 nanometres. The IIRS also measures water/hydroxyl features at high spatial resolutions like 80 metres as well as spectral resolutions like 20 nanometres for the first time. These measurements are expected to, over time, provide comprehensive maps of water and mineralogical features on the moon. According to ISRO's post on Chandrayaan-2's payloads, the IIRS will enable such measurements to be taken for the 'first time' at such a spectral range and resolution.
Even as Vikram crash-landed, ISRO Chairman K. Sivan had said the Chandrayaan-2 mission has achieved 98 per cent of its objectives. He had said the orbiter was doing well and performing scheduled science experiments.
A series of space missions
A series of high-profile global space missions are expected in 2020 and the early 2021. In July, UAE became the first Arab country to embark on a Mars mission with its spacecraft 'Al Amal', launched from Japan's remote Tanegashima spaceport. Al Amal, or 'Hope' probe, weighing 1.3 tonnes was launched via Mitsubishi's H-2A rocket. The probe is transmitting and the signals are being studied, UAE had announced post-launch. A newcomer in space development, the UAE has already put three Earth observation satellites into orbit. Two were developed by South Korea and launched by Russia, and a third—its own—was launched by Japan. A successful Hope mission to Mars would be a major step for the oil-dependent economy seeking a future in space, coming less than a year after the launch of the first Emirati astronaut Hazzaa Ali Almansoori.
China is also planning to embark on the first Mars exploration mission Tianwen-1 this year. Aiming to catch up with India, US, Russia and the European Union to reach the red planet, China’s Mars mission plans to complete orbiting, landing and roving in one go. China, in recent years, has emerged as a major space power with manned space missions, and landing a rover on the dark side of the moon. It is currently building a space station of its own. However, China’s attempts to send an exploratory probe to Mars called Yinghuo-1, in a Russian spacecraft in 2011, failed shortly after the launch and it was declared lost and later burnt during re-entry into earth.
NASA's Perseverance rover to Mars, expected to touch down on the Jezero crater, will look for signs of past microbial life in river delta deposits formed over billions of years that might have enhanced preservation of evidence of life. The delta, speculated to have formed due to sediment deposits at the mouth of Hypanis Valles, a river system on ancient Mars, separates the southern highlands from the northern lowlands. Scientists believe that Mars once had an ancient ocean and a water cycle similar to Earth's and large seas or an ocean ever existed in the northern lowlands. Findings from Jezero crater could aid our understanding of how life evolved on Earth. If life once existed there, it likely didn't evolve beyond the single-cell stage, scientists say. That's because Jezero crater formed over 3.5 billion years ago, long before organisms on Earth became multicellular. If life once existed at the surface, its evolution was stalled by some unknown event that sterilised the planet. That means the Martian crater could serve as a kind of time capsule preserving signs of life as it might once have existed on Earth.
India's major focus in 2020 will be on its third lunar mission (Chandrayaan-3), and Gaganyaan's first unmanned flight. According to the ISRO chairman, the government has approved the Chandrayaan-3 project, which will again attempt a soft landing on the moon, and the whole project will cost around Rs 615 crore. Gaganyaan, the human space mission, envisages to send three Indians to space by 2022. The four test pilots selected for this mission are currently undergoing training in Russia.
However, Sivan had expressed consternation that 10 space missions being prepared for launch this year were “disturbed” due to the coronavirus-induced lockdown. “Because of this [pandemic], everything got disturbed. We have to make an assessment after the COVID-19 issue is resolved,” Sivan had said. “Gaganyaan will be impacted because of the lockdown… all industries have not yet started functioning,” Sivan said.
