Rover Chandrayaan-3 lands in oldest crater where “no other missions have gone”; S.Vijayan says: “shows how the moon evolved”

Chandrayaan 3: India’s lunar mission has landed in one of the oldest craters on the moon, scientists said on Saturday. The crater, which “no other missions” have entered, is 3.85 billion years old, scientists said.

Scientists at the Physical Research Laboratory and Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) in Ahmedabad said the crater was formed during the Nectar Period, 3.5 billion years ago.

“No other missions went”

According to S. Vijayan, an associate professor in the Department of Planetary Sciences at the Physical Research Laboratory, the mission’s Pragyan rover flew to a location on the moon that no other mission has visited.

“Chandrayaan-3’s landing site is a unique geological environment where no other missions have been before. The mission’s Pragyan rover images are the first in situ of the Moon at this latitude. They show how the moon evolved,” Vijayan said, PTI reported.

Chandrayaan 3: How it landed in a crater

Researchers said a crater forms when an asteroid hits the surface of a larger body, displacing material called ejecta.

The mission’s Pragyan rover images are the first in situ of the Moon at this latitude.

Images of the Moon have shown that half of a crater is buried under ejecta from the South Pole-Aitken Basin, the largest and most prominent impact basin on the Moon.

An impact basin is a large, complex crater with a diameter of more than 300 km, while a normal crater is less than 300 km in diameter. In this case, Chandrayaan-3 was found to have landed in a crater about 160 km wide and appears in images as a nearly semicircular structure.

“In addition, ejecta or material ‘ejected’ from another, more distant impact crater was observed near the landing site – images captured by the Pragyan rover showed that material of the same type was present at the landing site,” Vijayan told a PTI Report.

On August 23, 2023, Chandrayaan-3 made a soft landing on the Moon’s south pole. The Indian government named the landing site “Shiv Shakti Point”.