A historic moment is about to come for Indians tonight as Chandrayaan-2 is going to make its soft landing on the moon’s surface. The mission of the spacecraft landing will make India the fourth country after the US, Russia, and China to conduct a soft landing on the moon.
ISRO in a statement said, “The lander Vikram is scheduled to powered descent between 01:00 to 02:00 hrs IST on September 07, 2019, which is then followed by touch down of Lander between 01:30 to 02:30 hrs IST.” Nehru Planetarium director Arvind Paranjape told that none of the countries except China have been able to achieve such a feat in last many years.
What is soft landing?
Former ISRO scientist Ravi Gupta while talking to NewsX explained what is soft landing on the moon’s surface. Soft landing is very crucial, critical and risky part of any spacecraft on the moon. Because, the moon has no atmosphere as earth does. It is almost a vacuum. This is the reason a spacecraft can’t make a safe landing at moon as on earth after reducing the speed of the spacecraft through aerodynamics.
The spacecraft has to reduce the speed to almost zero by firing the rocket motors towards the moon’s surface and make sure that the four legs of the spacecraft are touching the surface of the moon almost together. That is how a spacecraft makes its soft landing on the moon. After the soft landing, a flap will open and then a rover ‘Pragyaan’ will come out of the lander. The whole process takes about four hours.
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