Chandrayaan-3’s Pragyan rover sent an image of the Vikram lander using its navigation camera. All previous images and videos from ISRO’s third mission were taken by Vikram.
“Smile, please! Pragyan Rover clicked an image of Vikram Lander this morning. The ‘image of the mission’ was taken by the Navigation Camera onboard the Rover (NavCam),” ISRO tweeted.
The NavCams for the Chandrayaan-3 are developed by Bengaluru-based Laboratory for Electro-Optics Systems (LEOS), where first Indian satellite was fabricated in 1975.
In the tweeted image, ISRO marked two of the three payloads in Vikram lander — ChaSTE (Chandra’s Surface Thermo-physical Experiment) and ILSA (Instrument for Lunar Seismic Activity). ChaSTE payload recently shared new findings about temperature variations on the lunar surface. This was the first such profile for the lunar south pole.
ILSA measures seismicity around the landing site, now named Shivshakti, and helps delineate the structure of the lunar crust and mantle. This comes a day after the Pragyan rover confirmed the presence of sulphur on moon’s surface. It has also detected other elements like aluminium, calcium, iron, chromium, titanium, manganese, silicon and oxygen.
Both Vikram and Pragyan are designed to work on their solar-powered batteries and hence it will only work for 14 days or one lunar day. This will be followed by one lunar night or 14 days on earth, when there will be no sunlight to gather solar power from.
ISRO scientists have not ruled out the possibility of Vikram and Pragyan becoming active when the sun rises on the moon and solar power becomes available again after the fortnight-long darkness.
