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Despite going long past the end of the mission’s intended life, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) stuck out hope for the Chandrayaan-3 mission to be revived after the lunar night. As of now, it seems like that will remain a dream. As the Vikram lander and the Pragyan rover slept on the lunar surface, the launch of a US Space Force satellite may have punched a hole in the Earth’s upper atmosphere.
The Chandrayaan-3 mission’s lander and rover were designed to work for just one lunar day on the Moon. That is about 14 days, and that time has long passed. This is because the mission’s electronics were not designed to withstand the extreme conditions on the Moon during its nighttime. Temperatures can drop to well below 200 degrees Celsius and there is absolutely no sunlight for the solar-powered modules to work.
Interestingly, Russia’s Luna-25 might have fared a lot better if it managed to soft-land on the Moon. The Russian mission was designed with a “plutonium radioisotope device,” something like a nuclear battery. That “nuclear battery” could generate heat that could keep the instruments from freezing.
Despite the Chandrayaan-3 mission having no such feature, ISRO still held out hope. The space agency decided to take a chance to try to extend the lifespan of the lander and rover after the mission objectives were complete. They shut down all instruments a little before sunset and put them in “sleep mode.” There was a small chance that if the batteries were fully charged, they might have been able to keep the instruments warm enough to survive the lunar night.
So far, it does not seem like that decision has paid off.
While the Chandrayaan-3 mission’s modules were sleeping on the Moon, something very interesting happened much closer to home. The launch of a US Space Force satellite may have “punched a hole” in the ionosphere, which is part of the Earth’s upper atmosphere.
Texas-based private space technology firm Firefly Aerospace launched the Victus Nox satellite for the Space Force on September 14. Post-launch, a bright exhaust cone expanded over a large area of the sky reports Spaceweather.com. After this cone faded, there was a slight red afterglow, which could have been caused by the rocket punching a hole in the ionosphere. Could that be a problem?
To understand that we need to know what the ionosphere is and what it does. The ionosphere is a word used to refer to a series of regions in Earth’s atmosphere containing electrically charged molecules and atoms. Radio and GPS signals either travel through it or rely on bouncing off of it to reach their destinations, according to NASA.
A change in its composition and density, like what was caused by the Space Force launch, can disrupt signals. While the “hole” could affect low-frequency radio communications and even cause glitches in GPS systems, these effects are usually temporary because reionisation starts again after the Sun rises, and the ionosphere hole would have been patched up pretty soon after the launch.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has also been busy. Teams from the American space agency are preparing to retrieve a sample of an asteroid that will be dropped to Earth today. The OSIRIS-REx mission took samples from the asteroid Bennu more than two years ago. These samples could help scientists learn a lot about the early history of the universe.
