Chandrayaan-3 rover lands in 3.85-billion-year-old crater on the Moon
The crater where Chandrayaan 3 landed was formed during the Nectarian period.
Chandrayaan-3, India's lunar mission, has landed in a 3.85-billion-year-old crater on the Moon, scientists said on Saturday. The crater is one of the oldest on the Moon's surface.
The scientists, including those from the Physical Research Laboratory and Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Ahmedabad, said that the crater where Chandrayaan-3 landed was formed during the Nectarian period, about 3.85 billion years ago.
According to S Vijayan, an associate professor in the Planetary Sciences Division, Physical Research Laboratory, the mission's Pragyan rover has gone to a place on the Moon that no other missions has visited.
"Chandrayaan-3 landing site is a unique geological setting where no other missions have gone. The images from the mission's Pragyan rover are the first on-site ones of the Moon at this latitude. They reveal how the Moon evolved," he told PTI.
A crater is formed when an asteroid crashes into the surface of a larger body. The displaced material is called ejecta.
Revealing how the Moon evolved, the images showed that one-half of the crater was buried under material thrown out or 'ejecta' from the South Pole-Aitken basin -- the largest and most known impact basin on the Moon, the researchers said.
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An impact basin is a large, complex crater with a diameter of over 300 km, while a crater measures under 300 km in diameter.
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In this case, Chandrayaan-3 was found to have landed within a crater -- about 160 km in diameter -- and detected in the images as a nearly semi-circular structure.
The researchers said this likely indicated one half of the crater, the other half of which was 'degraded' by getting buried under ejecta.
"Further, near the landing site, ejecta or material 'thrown out' from another impact crater further away was observed -- images captured by the Pragyan rover revealed that material of the same nature was present at the landing site," Vijayan said, according to PTI.
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"Together, the images from the mission and satellites showed that the Chandrayaan-3 landing site consists of material deposited from different regions of the Moon," he said.
The Chandrayaan-3 made a soft landing on the Moon's south pole on August 23, 2023. It is the only mission to have landed on the south side of the Moon. The government calls the landing site Shiv Shakti Point., three days later.
With inputs from PTI
