New Delhi: Chandrayaan-3 rover Pragyan on Wednesday took a photo of lander Vikram with its navigation camera, which India’s space agency shared on X as an “image of the mission”.
“Smile, please,” the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) captioned the two photographs on X, which shows the lander along with two of its payloads ChaSTE and ILSA at work.
Chandrayaan-3 Mission:
Smile, please📸!
Pragyan Rover clicked an image of Vikram Lander this morning.
The ‘image of the mission’ was taken by the Navigation Camera onboard the Rover (NavCam).
NavCams for the Chandrayaan-3 Mission are developed by the Laboratory for… pic.twitter.com/Oece2bi6zE
— ISRO (@isro) August 30, 2023
ISRO also informed that the navigation camera for the mission was designed by its Laboratory for Electro-Optics Systems (LEOS) – a vital unit that designs, develops and produces attitude sensors for interplanetary missions, among other things.
Vikram made history on 23 August when it became the first spacecraft to land on the Moon’s south pole, carrying with it Pragyan which has been tasked with studying the lunar surface, and especially probe the presence of water ice.
Both solar-powered modules are racing against time to cover as much ground as possible since they can last only one Moon day or 14 Earth days.
The mission accomplished an important milestone Tuesday when Pragyan unambiguously confirmed the presence of sulphur on the lunar surface near the south pole, through first-ever, in-situ measurements.
It also detected aluminium, calcium, iron, chromium, titanium, manganese, silicon and oxygen, as expected.
ISRO said in a statement: “The Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) instrument onboard Chandrayaan-3 Rover has made the first-ever in-situ measurements on the elemental composition of the lunar surface near the south pole. These in-situ measurements confirm the presence of Sulphur (S) in the region unambiguously, something that was not feasible by the instruments onboard the orbiters.”
On Sunday, the rover had successfully changed its path after detecting a large crater on its way.
Chandrayaan-3 lifted off from Sriharikota on 14 July, and looped through the Earth and the Moon’s orbits to land on the lunar surface last week — making India the fourth country to accomplish that feat, and the first to touch down on the south pole.
Also read: All checks completed for mission to Sun, says ISRO; lift-off on 2 September