India's Chandrayaan-3 mission uncovers key findings on Moon's South Pole

while NASA has discovered a new crater on the moon the finding was made by the lunar reconnaissance Orbiter by comparing before and after images the cause of the new crater is likely from a Russian spacecraft which crashed a fortnight ago the location is about 400 kilometers from the spacecraft's intended landing spot joining me now live for more on this is astrophysicist and cosmologist at Anu Brad Tucker Brad good afternoon just how big is this crater yeah look it kind of puts it into scale kind of the impact altogether um when the Russian Luna 25 probe had this malfunction um in its attitude control system essentially had a burst of of a frost about one and a half times bigger it was supposed to burn or go towards the surface for 84 seconds went for 127 seconds and had too much and so this crater um is 100 you know over 100 meters wide it's actually a fairly large impact site um and so the fact that you can so easily spot it in this spot the difference from previous images the same area um really just goes to show how hard it hits and you know we've talked about this in in the framing of this new moon race it still is hard to do things we haven't sent actually that many Mission To The Moon you know put this in a scale there's only been maybe about 150 or so missions ever sent to the Moon not just humans but probes and Rovers and satellites you know if you put that into scale to Sydney airport Sydney airport has 800 flights a day so you know the the going to the Moon is still a young thing it's still hard and as you see the consequences can be dire yeah and every country is trying to figure it out so that's very clear now speaking of the Moon we know that a week ago India set down a robotic probe and it became I believe the first country to land near the lunar South Pole it's been hard at work I've read online Brad so what has it discovered so far that's right yeah India was the first to get to that lunar South Pole that same intended region Luna 25 was so this Rover has been on the surface yet for about eight or nine days now it has the rest of this week essentially or into mid next week uh before the the sun will just appear in the solar panels will run out so it's been really studying the composition of the Rocks now this has been the goal is what are the compositions the soil the lunar regolith as we say and the Rocks near these craters that it's landed at now it's found a lot of the things that it's found previously in terms of other mood exploration missions in the Apollo era um but what it's also found is that it's actually some of these rocks are rich in Silicon now this is important silicon is actually quite a big aspect to um uh potentially building materials when we talk about the Moon it also means those rocks are similar even more so to what we see here on Earth they've confirmed that there is indeed a lot of oxygen in the ground as well now that's one of the key things it's trying to quantify we've known that oxygen has been there how much of it is there that's been one of those big goals so it's found that as well so um it's really just pouring through as much data as it possibly can now as I said it's gonna eventually run out of solar power so it's sending that data to the solar or the Orbiter around the um the moon rather uh chandray and two that's going to store it on board and transmit it over time to Earth so the data is only now just beginning and we've just got some live pictures uh right now Brad on our screen of India's next mission it has launched a study to the Sun so these are live pictures that we're just getting into The Newsroom right now tell us about this mission yeah look you know we were just as he talked about uh showing the success of India's first mission landing on the moon uh and now yeah uh this new mission is headed to the Sun so the adita L1 mission is going to be in orbit around the Sun as we were just seeing here's the animation and before the actual launch of the rocket with the satellite on board what this satellite is going to do is going to be put into orbit around the Sun to study what we call the solar wind this is the activity that we see coming off the Sun the solar wind blows through space and actually affects us here on Earth um it produces things like the Aurora the Aurora astralis of Borealis that it can affect but it could also create interference and electrical systems satellites uh it can even affect electrical grids if you get a big enough storms from the Sun as we've seen in the past it can actually cause interference in electricity so there's a huge goal in a lot of countries studying the sun to essentially do solar weather to do this prediction and understand how does it originate and predict how it originates and this is you know when we talk about India and their growing role in space you know previously it would take months between these sorts of missions they had one landing on the moon two weeks ago they've been having their Rover operating and now they're already focused on their next one to the sun it just goes to show how advanced and Powerful India is in space yeah a genuine player in the space world uh it's it's incredible so I'm glad we got those um live pictures on our screen just as we were coming to that question Brad so uh good timing now let's move on because the first space station crew with four astronauts from four different countries has a docked at the space station what are they doing yeah so this was quite nice so earlier this week the crew seven so this was spacex's mission um for NASA of sending the next batches of astronauts now they'll be sending six months doing a variety of experiments based on the country or group they're flying under but as he said for the first time we've actually had four of them and all are from different countries so normally when we get a batch of astronauts that go up you have one American and one Russian because there's an American side in the Russian side um they had as well as the American and the Russian a Japanese astronaut uh as well as a European astronaut so he had four different essentially space agencies on this Mission working for the next six months together and so each of those groups will or people will do their own experiments and their own work and so I think this of the effect we're seeing in this new space race is that we still find ways of working together even during heightened political tensions here on Earth and just how many countries are involved you know we were just talking about India's success and we're watching India's rocket head to the sun right now but we've also really seen those different countries playing their own goals and experiments even the smaller ones um so to speak on the International Space Station so you know really in the past two weeks we've just seen clearly how much space is evolving yeah it's absolutely fascinating and uh you know every week we chat Brad something different is happening so there's never a dull moment in the space well unfortunately though we have run out of time thank you so much for joining us thanks

Channel: Sky News Australia

Views: 126,927

Keywords: 6336415176112, business, fb, global, msn, science, yt

Id: xljiGIit2TM

Length: 7min 20sec (440 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 02 2023