Next mission to Moon is with Japanese, more of Chandrayaan

“Of course, the Chandrayaan programme will not end with Chandrayaan-3. We have landed now. But there are many more things to do. It is natural to expect follow-up missions Chandrayaan-4, Chandrayaan-5 and so on. Those plans can be expected to be revealed soon,” said Mylswamy Annadurai, the mission director of Chandrayaan-1 that was launched in 2008.

“In fact, if Chandrayaan-2 had succeeded in landing, Chandrayaan-3 would have been a sample return mission. Now, maybe Chandrayaan-4 will be the sample return mission whenever it is planned. That is the next logical step to a lander and rover mission,” Annadurai said.

A sample return mission involves a spacecraft that can collect samples from the Moon’s surface and return to Earth. A returning spacecraft, and that too from the surface of the Moon and not just from space, adds several newer levels of complexity to a lander and rover mission. China did a sample return mission with Chang’e-5 in 2020.

But before that, LUPEX will offer ISRO another opportunity to probe the surface of the Moon. As its name suggests, LUPEX will also explore the polar regions of the Moon, this time venturing into the permanently shaded regions.

One half of the Moon never faces the Sun, and is therefore permanently dark. To land in these areas, the spacecraft and the onboard instruments have to have an alternative power supply option through an onboard battery.

LUPEX is also planned to investigate the abundance of water in the polar regions, and explore the possibilities of locating a long-term station in these areas.

For the LUPEX mission, the launch vehicle and rover are supposed to be contributed by the Japanese agency, while the lander will come from ISRO. Incidentally, JAXA is sending its own landing mission, its first, to the Moon later this week.

The immediate priority for ISRO is the Aditya-L1, its first mission to the Sun, which is slated for an early September launch. Aditya-L1, referred to by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his address today, will observe the Sun from a distance of 90 million km. It is meant to study the different kinds of phenomena like solar corona, solar emissions, solar winds and flares, and coronal mass ejections. It will also do an imaging of the Sun.

ISRO is working on sending an Orbiter to Venus within the next two years while the human spaceflight mission, Gaganyaan, is also being readied.

But the next mission that is likely to result in the same kind of excitement as Chandrayaan-3 is likely to come in ISRO’s collaborative mission with NASA. Just a couple of months ago, ISRO and NASA agreed to send a joint human spaceflight mission to the International Space Station by next year. That would mean that the first Indian astronauts to go in space in 40 years would ride a NASA spacecraft and not India’s own.