Why India Landed Chandrayaan-3 Near the Moon's South Pole
Most Moon landings aimed for the easy middle. India aimed for the hardest, coldest, most interesting edge — and there was a good reason.
On 23 August 2023 the Vikram lander of India's Chandrayaan-3 mission touched down on the Moon. India became the fourth country to land there — and the first to land near the lunar south pole.
What is special about the south pole?
Near the Moon's poles, the Sun never climbs high. It skims along the horizon, so shadows are enormously long and some crater floors have not seen sunlight for billions of years. Those permanently shadowed places are astonishingly cold — and cold is exactly what you need to trap water ice.
Water is the most useful thing anyone could find on the Moon. It is drinking water. Split apart, it is breathable oxygen and rocket fuel. A future Moon base would rather dig up water than carry it from Earth.
Why it is a hard place to land
- The ground is rougher and more heavily cratered than the flat plains near the equator.
- Long shadows make it harder for a spacecraft's cameras to judge what is a safe patch and what is a boulder.
- There is less margin for error: a lander must pick its own spot in the last seconds, on its own, because radio signals take time to reach Earth and come back.
Chandrayaan-3 carried the Pragyan rover, which rolled off the lander and spent its working days studying the soil and temperature near the landing site during a single lunar day — about fourteen Earth days of sunlight.
An earlier attempt, Chandrayaan-2, did not land successfully in 2019. The team studied what went wrong and tried again.