Soft Landing on Moon

Category
Science & Technology
Published
5th Mar, 2024

Context

The United States have achieved first moon landing (moon's south pole) in half century with private spacecraft (Texas-based company Intuitive Machines).

Dimension 1: Complexities of soft landing

A soft landing entails a successful landing by a spacecraft without sustaining any significant damage to itself or its payloads.
Whereas, in a hard landing, the probe suffers damage which may result in the failure of the mission.

Fact Box: The South Pole

The region has a difficult terrain, full of craters and deep trenches. It is also far from the equatorial region explored by previous lunar missions.
Some areas on the south pole are shrouded in darkness and have never received sunlight.
Temperatures are so cold there that they can plummet to as low as -230 degree Celsius. This rocky terrain, complete darkness and extremely cold weather make it more difficult for electronic instruments to function properly.
Situated on the edge of the Aitken basin, the largest impact basin on the Moon, the lunar south pole offers a unique opportunity to study materials from the Moon's deep crust and mantle.
Before Russia, countries such as Japan, Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have tried and failed to land on the Moon’s south pole.

Dimension 2: Challenges of Landing on Moon

Less gravity than Earth:The Moon has much less gravity than the Earth. Its thin and tenuous atmosphere, along with lunar dust, also makes it tough for spacecraft to land.
Dust:The presence of dust, even in very small quantities, can have a significant effect on temperature control and optical performance of hardware on the lunar surface.
Deep space communicationalso poses a challenge as the “large distance from the Earth and the limited on-board and radio signals are weak with heavy background noises that need to be picked up by large antennas”.

US touchdown

It is the first U.S. touchdown on the lunar surface in more than half a century and the first ever achieved by the private sector.
- The landing represented the first controlled descent to the lunar surface by a U.S. spacecraft since Apollo 17 in 1972, when NASA's last crewed moon mission landed there with astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt.

To date, spacecraft from just four other countries have ever landed on the moon - the former Soviet Union, China, India and, mostly recently, just last month, Japan. The United States is the only one ever to have sent humans to the lunar surface.