It has been a year since Chandrayaan-3 landed on the surface of the moon. A day before this, on August 22, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) shared some pictures of the moon. The special thing is that these pictures have been taken from Vikram Lander and Pragyan Rover. On July 14, Chandrayaan-3 started its journey to the moon from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh, which ended on August 23 with a soft landing on the South Pole.
The National Space Agency wrote on Thursday, ‘ISRO is going to present thousands of pictures taken by Vikram Lander and Pragyan Rover tomorrow on the landing anniversary of Chandrayaan-3.’ The organization said, ‘These pictures have been taken from the Lander Imager (LI) and Rover Imager (RI) on Vikram. The first three pictures are from LI and the last one is from RI.’
National Space Day will be celebrated today
In memory of the soft landing of Chandrayaan-3, the government had announced to celebrate National Space Day on 23 August. India is going to celebrate its first Space Day on Friday. The place where the soft landing took place was called Shiv Shakti Point.
Chandrayaan-3 mission revealed the secret of the early development of the Moon
A team of scientists from Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), Ahmedabad and ISRO has said in their research that Chandrayaan-3 mission has revealed the secret of the early development of the moon. The team said in their research that according to the information received from the Pragyan Rover of Chandrayaan-3 mission, the surface of the moon was covered with an ocean of magma. This analysis was about the measurement of soil on the moon. These data were recorded by Pragyan Rover on the surface of the moon.
The researchers analysed these data which revealed that the lunar soil is composed of ferroan anorthosite, a type of rock. Using measurements made by the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) on the Pragyan rover, they have reported the first in-situ elemental abundance of lunar soil near the south polar region.
The study, published in the journal Nature, provided evidence supporting the lunar magma ocean hypothesis, which predicts that the primitive lunar crust formed as a result of the floatation of lighter anorthite plagioclase, but APXS also detected an excess abundance of magnesium-rich minerals, suggesting the contribution of deeper crustal material ejected from the South Pole-Aitken Basin during its formation.
(With agency input)