'Real fruit will come after...': Top space physicist as countdown begins for Chandrayaan-3's landing on Moon

Ahead of Chandrayaan-3's planned soft-landing, a top Indian space physicist on Sunday said that the lunar mission's rover payloads will help in knowing the kind of minerals present there on the Moon. Dr K Rajeev, Director of Space Physics Laboratory, said that real fruit will come after the safe landing of Chandrayaan-3.

Also read: Russia's Luna-25 crash-lands on Moon day before planned touch down on south pole

"Rover's payloads will help in knowing the kind of minerals present there (moon). For the first time, we are going to have the profiling of the lunar regolith," he said while speaking to the news agency ANI. "Chandrayaan-2 lander is still orbiting and we are getting data," he further said.

India's space agency Isro said that Chandrayaan-3 will land on the south pole of the Moon at 6:04 pm on August 23. Chandrayaan-3's Lander Module comprises lander Vikram and rover Pragyan. The rover has two payloads - Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS), and Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS).

The APXS will help Isro derive the chemical composition and infer mineralogical composition to further enhance its understanding of the lunar surface. The LIBS payload will help the spacer agency determine the elemental composition (Mg, Al, Si, K, Ca, Ti, Fe) of lunar soil and rocks around the lunar landing site.

Also read: 'Landing part is most difficult,' say netizens as Russia's Luna-25 crash-lands on Moon 

Dr RC Kapoor, astronomer and a professor, said the Chandrayaan-3 mission is going as planned. "We hope that on 23rd August the landing of Chandrayaan-3 happens accurately, as our lander and rover are fully programmed and all our instruments are functioning well," he said.

Speaking on the crash-landing of Russia's Luna-25, the professor said: "That's very sad news and we are very sad about it." "We could have discussed our findings. Now this can't happen. Till now Chandrayaan-3 has been working very well and I hope it lands safely and works successfully."

Earlier today, Russia's space agency Roscosmos informed that its spacecraft, which was to land on the south pole on Monday, had crash-landed after some glitch in the pre-landing maneuver. The agency said that on Saturday, in accordance with the flight program of the Luna-25 spacecraft, the output of an impulse was provided for the formation of its pre-landing elliptical orbit.

"At about 14:57 Moscow time, communication with the Luna-25 spacecraft was interrupted," the agency said. "The measures taken on August 19 and 20 to search for the device and get into contact with it did not produce any results."

"According to the results of the preliminary analysis, due to the deviation of the actual parameters of the impulse from the calculated ones, the device switched to an off-design orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the lunar surface," the Roscosmos said, announcing the end of the second lunar mission in nearly five decades.  

Russia's space agency has formed a special interdepartmental commission, which will deal with the issues of clarifying the reasons for the loss of Luna-25.

Meanwhile, Isro has said that Chandrayaan-3 is set to land on the Moon at 6:04 pm on August 23, Wednesday.