Exactly one year back on August 23, 2023, India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission accomplished safe and soft-landing of Vikram Lander on the surface of the Moon. This landing site is now known as ‘Shiv Shakti’ point. August 23 has been declared as the ‘National Space Day’. India is celebrating its maiden National Space Day on August 23, 2024.
India had launched its first satellite called Aryabhata on April 19, 1975 with the assistance from the erstwhile USSR. On July 18, 1980, India launched its indigenously developed first experimental satellite launch vehicle, the SLV-3. This rocket had put Rohini in a correct orbit. With this success, India became a spacefaring nation by demonstrating its capability in the field of development of the satellite, developing a rocket launcher system and having its own ground infrastructure to operate and track the satellite.
During the last five decades, India has come a long way in the domain of space. It has been a difficult journey for various reasons. There were both financial and technological challenges. For a third world country, which in today’s lexicon is known as a state from the Global South, financial challenges are obvious. During the 1960s, the world was ready to share space technology with India and actually during the mid-1960s there was collaboration happening with the states like the US, France and few others (Sounding Rocket programme). However, during 1974 India conducted its first nuclear test and subsequently during 1998 conducted a series of nuclear tests. This led India to come under sanctions and thus started the phase of technological apartheid. It continued till around 2008/2010. The success of the Indo-US nuclear deal led to India getting out of the sanction regime.
Interestingly, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) which has been spearheading India’s space agenda since the 1970s found an opportunity in the international exclusion in regards to critical technology transfer. They started working independently almost from the scratch and just a year back they were there on the surface of the Moon. A decade back they had also entered the Martian orbit successfully.
India’s quest for the Moon started during 2008 with a successful lunar injection during Chandrayaan-1 mission. This mission was instrumental towards identifying the presence of water on the lunar surface.
Chandrayaan-3 had carried critical payloads with rover and lander units. Sensors were placed both on the lander and rover units. The lander sensors measured the thermal conductivity and temperature of the lunar surface. ISRO released the data received from this payload immediately. Based on the available data, it was found that there is a significant amount of variation in the temperature. Also, ISRO has been able to underline the presence of sulphur around the southern pole of the Moon. They have also collected some data which could increase the understanding about the possibilities of moonquake and also plasma measurements were carried out. During this short mission (14 earth days), ISRO attempted to study the mineralogical and chemical composition of the lunar surface and beneath. The presence of titanium, iron, calcium, oxygen, manganese and silicon has been established. Also, based on the analysis of data received from this mission ISRO has been successful to provide fresh evidence for a long-standing hypothesis that the entire Moon was covered by hot molten rock – a liquid magma ocean – early after its formation.
The success of Chandrayaan-3 appears to have motivated ISRO further and today they are ready with the design for the Chandrayaan-4 and 5 missions. Chandrayaan-4 mission is going to be a very interesting mission which would be bringing back samples of rocks and soil from the lunar surface to Earth. This would help the Indian scientific community to undertake a detailed analysis of the rocks on the Moon. This mission is going to be extremely challenging and would involve a soft landing on the lunar surface, launching a spacecraft from the Moon back to earth for sample return and demonstrating a space docking experiment in lunar orbit.
Also Read: Mission Chandrayaan-3 – India’s successful soft landing on the Moon
The Chandrayaan-4 mission is expected to be launched in 2027. The fifth mission to Moon is expected to be a joint venture between India and Japan. This ISRO-Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission would explore the polar region of the Moon. This mission is expected to be a multi-agency involvement mission. JAXA would be providing the lunar rover and ISRO’s contribution would be the lander unit which would carry the rover in its belly. Some sensors for observations and experimentation could come from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).
For ISRO, Chandrayaan-4 is going to be a challenging mission from the word go. ISRO is launching this mission in parts. Different modules of this mission would be launched separately and they would be joined together in space and subsequently the journey of this mission towards the Moon would begin. Connecting various subsystems in space and converting them into a one operational unit is both intricate and exciting. This is an important technology/technique to master particularly from the perspective of building the Indian Space Station by 2030/2035. ISRO is smartly using the opportunity of Chandrayaan-4 to master this art in advance.
However, there is one flip side to this experiment too. ISRO needs to undertake part by part launching of the Chandrayaan-4 mission since they do not have a rocket for launching heavy satellites in space. NASA’s Apollo 11 mission, which had three astronauts onboard reached the lunar surface and got back to the earth in around seven-days of time during the year 1969. However, during 2023, Chandrayaan-3 mission took around 40-days to reach the Moon! Even today ISRO’s launch vehicles are not powerful enough to undertake missions like Chandrayaan-4 in a single launch. Their LVM-3 vehicle in a single launch cannot do the required job and hence ISRO will need two LVM-3 launches to launch all the sections of Chandrayaan 4. Heavy satellite launch vehicles are one area which ISRO has been working on for a long time. Today, ISRO is in a position to carry only around 4-ton category of satellites to the geostationary orbits. However, most of the communication satellites require a launcher which can carry around 6 to 8-ton category satellites. For longtime now ISRO has been depending on the French launcher called Ariane for putting their heavy satellites in space. This is one field where ISRO needs to put more efforts.
All in all, it could be said that ISRO’s journey has been momentous barring few exceptions. This year’s theme for the National Space Day is ‘Touching Lives while Touching the Moon: India’s Space Saga’. It could be said that investments in the fields like Meteorology, Remote sensing, Communications and Navigation have directly/indirectly assisted India’s growth story in a big way. The success with missions to Moon and Mars indicate that India is almost at par with the developed world in these fields. India’s accomplishment in space technologies has forced the world to take note of India’s scientific prowess. Today, from Panchayat to Parliament, space technology has become a crucial part of India’s development and governance model. National Space Day is a day to say, Thank You.
