India’s Moon Shot Adds to Country’s Growing Space Endeavors

India’s ambitious Moon exploration spacecraft, the Chandrayaan-3, is now en route to its lunar target, following a successful burn this week. The lander is to unleash a rover, which like the lander itself is stuffed with scientific instruments to inspect the lunar surface in the southern lunar hemisphere.

A powerful GSLV MkIII booster roared skyward on July 14 from the Satish Dhawan Space Center, Sriharikota, hurling Chandrayaan-3 into Earth orbit. The craft first carried out a series of orbit-raising maneuvers around the Earth. Those propulsive nudges led to the critical August 1 engine burn that placed the vehicle on a journey toward its celestial destination.

“Next stop: the Moon,” declared an internet posting from the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). All appears on track for the Chandrayaan-3 to swing into lunar orbit on August 5. The probe’s propulsion module will place the lander/rover into a circular polar lunar orbit and then detach.

India’s lander will then head for a touchdown on August 23 within the southern region of the Moon’s near side, soft landing about 13 miles (20 kilometers) west of the Manzinus U crater rim.

This is not India’s first Moon landing attempt.

In fact, the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter is currently circuiting the Moon, left there following a failed try to reconnoiter the Moon with a lander and rover back in September 2019. After being cast off from the orbiter, the descent of the lander went well. But communication with the vehicle was lost as the craft augured into the barren lunar scenery.

This time, given a safe and sound touchdown on the Moon, India would join an elite group of successful lunar landing countries: the former Soviet Union (now Russia), the United States, and China.

Following separation of the lander module, the propulsion module is to run a Spectro-polarimetry of Habitable Planet Earth (SHAPE) payload, an experiment that will study the Earth from lunar orbit.

Also, the Chandrayaan-3 propulsion module is to remain in orbit around the Moon, serving as a communications relay satellite.

Once down on the Moon, the lander and rover are designed to operate for one lunar daylight period (about 14 Earth days).

Both the Chandrayaan-3 lander and rover are loaded with scientific gear.

Moon lander payloads: Chandra’s Surface Thermophysical Experiment (ChaSTE) to measure the thermal conductivity and temperature; Instrument for Lunar Seismic Activity (ILSA) for measuring the seismicity around the landing site; Langmuir Probe (LP) to estimate the plasma density and its variations. A passive Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA) attached to the lander was provided by NASA.

Moon rover payloads: Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) and Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS) to judge the elemental composition of lunar materials in the vicinity of landing site.

Thanks to the NASA-supplied LRA, which NASA Goddard Space Flight Center researcher Daniel Cremons told SpaceRef is mounted atop the lander, specialists will be able to precisely determine the lander’s location on the Moon.

An LRA consists of eight tiny retroreflectors affixed to a hemispherical platform. The total mass of the LRA is just 20 grams, and it requires no power. The device, when struck by laser light, reflects the light back to its source to reveal its location.

LRAs can be used as precision landmarks for guidance and navigation during the lunar day or night. In the future, by placing a few LRAs around a specific site they can guide arriving robotic or human-carrying landers to a safe, pinpoint landing.

However, in this case, the ultra-small LRA is too small to capture a laser pulse shot from Earth. Instead, it was fabricated to reflect laser light from a laser altimeter or Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) equipment on a spacecraft orbiting the Moon or landing on the Moon.

Cremons said that the NASA LRA project office is also supplying similar devices for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services missions as well as for the upcoming Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) mission.

Following the Moon landing failure of Chandrayaan-2, the ISRO has a lot riding on Chandrayaan-3’s success, especially given India’s blossoming emergence as a major player in the global space industry.

“If Chandrayaan 3 lander fails, it will be a huge national setback, irrespective of the cause,” Gurbir Singh, the UK-based author of The Indian Space Program: India’s incredible journey from the Third World towards the First, told SpaceRef.

Singh said that India’s now-en route lunar probe has technology objectives that are important for ISRO to demonstrate its technical competence, and critical for its future ambitions to land on Mars and elsewhere.

“All space agencies are familiar with mission failures,” Singh observed. ISRO worked through its first launcher failure in 1979 and slogged through repeated failures with its cryogenic rocket engines in 2010, he said.

“If the Chandrayaan 3 lander fails, ISRO will set up a failure analysis committee, investigate and try again. It will be the pursuit of national pride that another failure will result in an immediate announcement of Chandrayaan-4, probably before the end of 2025,” said Singh.

Singh offered a look at the broader geopolitics of India’s growing space endeavors — not only dispatching robotic explorers to the Moon, but also pressing forward on a home-grown human spaceflight agenda.

For instance, during a June 21 ceremony in Washington, DC India became the 27th country to sign the NASA-promulgated Artemis Accords – a pact that establishes a practical set of principles to steer space exploration cooperation among nations participating in NASA’s back-to-the-Moon Artemis effort.

“India is taking a landmark step in becoming a party to the Artemis Accords, a momentous occasion for our bilateral space cooperation,” said Taranjit Singh Sandhu, India’s ambassador to the United States, while inking the Accords. “We are confident that the Artemis Accords will advance a rule-based approach to outer space.”

India recognized the significance for the United States if it signed the Artemis Accords, space analyst Singh said. “As a major space power, India’s signature would probably set the USA’s Artemis Accords to become a de facto global standard. India saw an opportunity and bargained hard.”

Indeed, with the signing of the Accords, NASA agreed to fly an Indian astronaut to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2024.

Singh said that “if an Indian astronaut makes it to the ISS in 2024, a tight timeline, he will probably be one of the four already trained in Russia for India’s Gaganyaan program. With Russia’s space activities in severe decline, India rightly sees many opportunities with NASA to accelerate its space activities, human and otherwise,” he said.

“In the ebb and flow of geopolitics,” Singh added, “the deals signed by the world’s largest democracy and the most powerful one make sense for both.”

However, human spaceflight does not align well with India’s vision of harnessing space technology for national development, Singh observed. In fact, Vikram Sarabhai, India’s founding father of space exploration, explicitly excluded human spaceflight from its original objectives, he added.

“Return on investment in communication, remote sensing, and meteorology spacecraft makes sense,” Singh added, “but no buck spent on its human spaceflight program makes anything close to a bang.”

That said, India announced its human spaceflight endeavor, Gaganyaan, in 2018 with the goal of achieving its first piloted flight in 2023. By now, this is more likely to happen in 2025, Singh said.

As with the heady days of the “Cold War” and the “Space Race,” India’s Gaganyaan initiative is driven by a geopolitical imperative. “India has to have human spaceflight capability and a space station because China has,” Singh commented.

Leonard is author of Moon Rush: The New Space Race, Mars – Our Future on the Red Planet, and co-authored with Apollo 11’s Buzz Aldrin of Mission to Mars – My Vision for Space Exploration - all published by the National Geographic Society.