The dusk of August 23rd, 2023 was not any regular sunset for the people of India, India achieved an important milestone by being the fourth country in the world to achieve a soft landing on the moon and the first country to land near the south pole of the moon successfully, the sun rises each day henceforth symbolizing India’s supremacy in the space sector. Soft landing on the moon brings leaps of promising future to a country which launched its first rocket by transporting and assembling its parts through a bicycle. It brings new light on our nation and the potential we hold especially with more than 800 million youth.
As much as we feel honored and proud of such a prominent accomplishment, it couldn’t have been possible without the strenuous efforts of our scientists who made the three ambitious missions to the moon and all of them served as pivotal lessons to make the next mission a better one. Mr. Myilswamy Annadurai headed Chandrayaan 1 successfully, Ms.Muthayaa Vanitha & Mr. N Sivan headed Chandrayaan 2 though the Vikram lander and the Pragyan rover crashed minutes before landing the orbiter is still orbiting the moon as of August 2023, which made the mission a partial success and Mr. Veeramuthuvel headed Chandrayaan 3 all of these most finest and proficient scientific minds of our country made India’s most crucial historical and scientific venture possible, and notably all of these scientists hail from our native land, Tamil Nadu.
In our childhood, we’ve often heard stories about the moon while being fed by our family but never considered that there could be much more to that story. A fundamental question that arises is our mind is as to why go to the moon? Why chandrayaan? Why spend millions on space research and exploration? Why use money and other resources on going to Mars and the moon when it can feed and shelter crores of people in need on earth globally? Well, simple answers to that are :
The Moon holds a record of Earth’s early history, in the early formation of the solar system, a record that has been erased on earth by restless geologic processes. The Moon will provide scientists with new and better understandings of early earth, how the Earth-Moon system and how the solar system were formed and evolved, and the role of asteroid impacts in influencing Earth’s history.
It is an exciting and interesting place to test new technologies with minimal or no impact on the moon at all. It presents numerous possibilities to test new and upcoming engineering challenges such as testing life support systems, testing advanced material that can withstand the temperature and radiation extremes of the space.
Understanding asteroids and being preventive from their attacks on earth, the internet!!!!! wouldn’t have been a reality without all the satellites in space. Keeping astronauts healthy in a lower-gravity and higher-radiation environment than earth is an important challenge for medical researchers. The potential benefits to all humans are tremendous in terms of prevention and treatment of bone and muscle loss and some cancers.
The reasons to advance in space research remains based on the above factors and innumerable more reasons a very much essential research and investment. Thanks to our finest scientists and many more sitting in physics lectures in the classrooms, the future, who are going to make this endeavour possible for the betterment of mankind; to enhance life on earth and make it a better place.
