Chandrayaan-3 lander camera captures Pragyan Rover ‘playfully’ rotating
by Komal KashyapISRO’s Chandrayaan-3 mission shares a captivating video of the Pragyan rover gracefully navigating the lunar surface, its nimble rotations revealing its quest for a secure path.
The video went viral on August 31.
Visuals showed in a heartwarming lunar scene, Pragyan’s rover gracefully dances across the moon’s surface, tracing an elegant circular path. Against the vast expanse of the lunar landscape, the rover’s movements resemble a joyful child frolicking in the gentle embrace of the moon’s gravity.
Since the Chandrayaan-3 mission soft-landed on the lunar surface on August 23, the lander and rover have been hard at work, carrying out many science experiments. The space agency on Tuesday released data on the temperature profile of the lunar surface and also said that Chandrayaan-3 had detected the presence of many elements on the Moon. Most notably, it had picked up signals confirming the presence of sulfur, presenting the first direct evidence of that on the Moon.
The LIBS (Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy) instrument on the rover uses a high-energy pulsar that can generate plasma from rocks and soil. In this state, elements emit radiation in characteristic wavelengths that can be used to identify them, according to ISRO.
On Monday, the agency announced that Pragyan encountered a large crater directly ahead of its path, which meant that it had to reroute itself. Both the rover and the lander are designed to function for a lunar day. One lunar day is equal to about 14 days on Earth. Daytime began on the Moon on August 23, the day when the mission landed. During the lunar day, sunlight will be continually available. Since the mission’s instruments are solar-powered, they can only remain operational for one lunar day. Also, it gets extremely cold on the Moon during night time with temperatures going as low as minus 100 degrees Celsius. Electronics that are not designed to operate at such low temperatures could stop working during the “lunar night.”
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