From the looks of it, the Vikram lander and Pragya rover, the two components of the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft on the moon, may never wake up.
As of late Friday night, the Indian space agency ISRO tweeted on
ISRO, however, said “no signal has been received from them as of now,” adding that “efforts to establish contact will continue.”
Since the fateful day of ISRO’s soft landing of Vikram on the lunar surface on August 23, the instruments on the lander and the rover that later slid out of Vikram’s belly have been active for nearly two weeks. Conduct various experiments. But when the lunar calendar ends on September 3, they enter “sleep mode.”
The question of whether landers and rovers will wake up has been at the forefront of every space enthusiast’s mind ever since. After 14 Earth days, the first ray of sunlight shines on the lunar surface, and the world is nervously waiting for the latest news from ISRO.
But it now appears that the latest immigrants to land on the moon will either come to life again or die from the lunar cold.
We all know that the chances of Vikram being resurrected and the rover crawling around the eerily inhospitable South Pole of the Moon are slim. Extremely cold temperatures at night may be well below -220 degrees Celsius, and electronic components will freeze to death.
as Business line pointed out in an article previous reportIt’s not that ISRO can’t provide life-preserving warmth to landers and rovers, but adding functionality would complicate the mission, whose main goal is to demonstrate a soft landing on the moon.
Spacecraft can be protected from the extreme cold of space in a number of ways, for example, through radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), in which the radioactive decay of plutonium-238 is accompanied by the release of heat.
