(New Delhi) The silence of the Indian mobile robot on a mission to the Moon does not worry the head of the Indian space agency who declared to the press, on the night of Thursday to Friday, that the machine “did what that was expected of him.
Pragyan (“wisdom”, in Sanskrit), a six-wheeled vehicle powered by solar energy, carried out a scientific mission to the South Pole region of the Moon before being powered off for the duration of the night lunar, or about two weeks.
The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) planned to extend the mission of the mobile robot by reactivating it once light returns to the lunar surface, but the machine has still not reacted.
“It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t wake up, because he did what was expected of him,” said S. Somnath, head of ISRO, quoted by the PTI news agency.
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“No signal from them has yet been received,” the space agency said.
According to the Indian Space Agency, the vehicle’s mission was to survey the still poorly mapped region of the lunar South Pole and transmit images and scientific data for two weeks.
The Indian mobile robot thus confirmed the presence of sulfur, aluminum, calcium, iron, chromium and titanium on the lunar surface, ISRO announced in a press release. Other measurements also showed the presence of manganese, silicon and oxygen.
On August 23, India became the first nation to land a spacecraft, Chandrayaan-3, near the South Pole of the Moon and joined the very select club of countries that have successfully carried out a controlled moon landing.
Before it, only the United States, the Soviet Union and China had already managed to successfully carry out such an operation.
A few days before the Indian spacecraft landed, the Russian Luna-25 probe crashed in the same area.
In 2014, India became the first Asian nation to place a spacecraft in orbit around the planet Mars.
It plans to launch a three-day manned mission around Earth by next year.