Heading down South : ISRO images the Lunar South Pole
Pranav Krishnan
Exciting news coming this week from the South Pole of the moon! We unfortunately don’t have correspondents posted in that particular outpost, but we do have the next best thing — our very own ISRO.
While a lot of national interest went into the excruciatingly close failure of the Vikram Lander to be the first-ever near the moon’s south pole, it’s often forgotten that our Space Agency did accomplish a significant feat. Chandrayaan-2 orbiter- the namesake of the highly successful 2008 mission that launched ISRO into the forefront of global space exploration — just beamed back some pioneering scientific data.
High-Res Image delivery for Sriharikota
The orbiter of the lunar mission that also included the lander-rover, it is stationed in a circular orbit about 100 km above the moon and is equipped with eight different instruments. These include two cameras — a terrain mapping camera and an orbiter high-resolution camera (OHRC) — which were the source of the first data sent home. The brief of the mission was to create detailed maps of the lunar surface at the little-explored south pole, paving the way for future manned missions. It has begun doing just that, sending home the most detailed images of the lunar surface ever made by an orbiting craft. The result? Individual features that are only 25 centimetres across are clearly distinguishable!
ISRO released these images Friday, just before the Vijayadashami long weekend, reporting that these images were captured by the OHRC on September 5th. The lunar south pole is a region pocked with unique craters — sunlight does not reach their interior, creating ‘cold traps’, in which volatiles like hydrogen and water ice are frozen. Not only does this tell us a lot about the water ice on the moon, crucial for future manned missions, but also allows us a glimpse into the formation of our Solar System, since these volatiles date from back then!
As is visible in the images, crater and boulder locations are clearly visible and tagged, which might serve as an accurate guide to humans setting foot on the Polar Southside very soon
What the future holds
What’s next for the orbiter while its cameras are busy mapping what humans have never seen before? An instrument called the Chandrayaan-2 Large Area Soft X-ray Spectrometer, or CLASS, is designed to measure X-ray fluorescence. This means the next time a solar flare sends a host of X-rays throttling towards the moon, Chandrayaan-2 can map the composition of the lunar surface by identifying elements like magnesium, aluminum, silicon and iron.
While it waits for the sun to give out one of its routine bursts equivalent to a million exploding hydrogen bombs (not a Linkin Park reference, promise), it’s also being useful to us back on earth though. When the moon passes within the part of the Earth’s magnetosphere distorted by the sun’s constant solar wind, the orbiter can look inside it, and see what’s going on. And what we’ve found is a sharp increase in electrons inside this ‘geotail’, and these measurements could provide valuable insights into how solar winds affect our planet’s magnetic field.
We eagerly await ISRO’s announcements over the next year from this exciting mission, as they are going to be enthralling without a doubt. This is one sequel that’s living up to the hype of its legendary predecessor.
