NEW DELHI , Aug 23 India's Pragyan lunar rover, delivered to the moon's south pole on Wednesday aboard the Vikram lander, has landed on the surface of Earth's natural satellite, the Indian Space Research Organization said.
The space agency has released the first photo of a lunar rover showing its wheels and lander ramp.
Earlier, the head of the Indian Space Research Organization, Sridhara Somanath, said that the launch of the lunar rover could take place some time after landing, this is due to the fact that the Vikram descent module kicked up dust on landing.
The descent module of the Indian mission «Chandrayan-3» with a lunar rover on board landed on the moon on August 23 at 18.04 local time (15.34 Moscow time). Thus, India became the fourth country that was able to deliver its own device to the moon — after the USSR, the USA and China — and the first in the world, whose device made a soft landing on the south pole of the moon.
It is expected that the payload of the lunar rover of the Chandrayaan-3 mission will provide breakthrough knowledge about the elemental composition of the lunar surface. The lunar rover is equipped with an X-ray alpha-particle spectrometer and a laser-guided spectroscope. The data obtained from the lunar rover is significant, given the traces of ice at the south pole of the moon, discovered during the Chandrayaan-1 mission in 2009.
Also, detectors are installed on the Vikram descent module. ChaSTE (Chandra Ground Thermal Experiment), one of the lander's useful modules, is designed to measure the thermal properties of the lunar surface near the polar region. The lander also carries a Rambha-Langmuir probe that will measure the plasma (ions, electrons) around the landing site for one lunar day (14 Earth days), and a lunar seismic activity detector that will provide new information about lunar earthquakes and micrometeorites.