[ad_1]
Chandrayaan 3: India’s lunar mission has landed in one of the oldest craters on the moon, scientists said on Saturday. Scientists said the crater, which ‘no other mission’ has visited, is 3.85 billion years old.
Scientists from the Physical Research Laboratory and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), Ahmedabad, said the crater was formed 3.5 billion years ago during the Nectarean period.
‘No other mission went’
According to S Vijayan, Associate Professor, Planetary Sciences Division, Physical Research Laboratory, the mission’s Pragyan rover has gone to a place on the Moon where no other mission has gone.
“The Chandrayaan-3 landing site is a unique geological setting where no other mission has visited. The images from the mission’s Pragyaan rover are the first on-site images of the Moon at this latitude. They explain how the Moon evolved,” Vijayan told PTI.
Chandrayaan 3: How did it land in the crater?
The researchers said a crater is formed when an asteroid hits the surface of a larger body, displacing material called ejecta.
The images from the mission’s Pragyaan rover are the first on-site images of the Moon at this latitude.
Images of the Moon revealed half of a crater buried under ejecta from the South Pole-Aitken Basin, the largest and most prominent impact basin on the Moon.
An impact basin is defined as a large, complex crater that has a diameter of more than 300 km, while a regular crater has a diameter of less than 300 km. In this example, Chandrayaan-3 was found to land in an approximately 160 km wide crater, which appears as a roughly semi-circular structure in the images.
“Also, near the landing site, ejecta or material ‘thrown out’ from another impact crater was observed – images taken by the Pragyan rover revealed that material of the same nature was present at the landing site,” Vijayan said. A report by PTI.
On August 23, 2023, Chandrayaan-3 made a soft landing on the south pole of the Moon. The Government of India named the landing site ‘Shiv Shakti Point’.
[ad_2]
