Chandrayaan-3 made a historic landing on the moon on August 23. The lander module, named Vikram, and the rover, Pragyan, touched down on the Shiva Shakti Point. The Indian Space Research Organisation on Friday revealed that lander Vikram displaced approximately 2.06 tonnes of lunar regolith (rocks and soil) as it landed on the surface of the Moon.
Chandrayaan-3 made a historic landing on the moon on August 23. The lander module, named Vikram, and the rover, Pragyan, touched down on the Shiva Shakti Point in the South Polar Region of the Moon.
As Vikram descended and subsequently touched down on the lunar surface, it triggered the activation of its descent stage thrusters which resulted in the ejection of a substantial amount of lunar surficial epi-regolith (the top surface of the lunar soil or regolith) material, creating what scientists are now calling a “reflectance anomaly” or an ‘ejecta halo’
Researchers from the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), one of the many scientific institutions associated with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) have characterized the lunar dust kicked up by the Vikram lander during the historic soft controlled landing on the surface of the Moon on August 23, 2023.
The scientific payloads on board the Chandrayaan 3 mission have themselves beamed back measurements of the thermal characteristics of the moon dust, the high energy particle environment close to the lunar surface, and lunar rumblings caused by the rover navigating across the surface as well as a natural event that could be a moonquake or an asteroid impact.