India's Chandrayaan-3 Space Exploration Craft Fails to Establish Contact

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) announced via its social media platform X that efforts to establish contact with the Chandrayaan-3 space exploration craft, including its lander Vikram and rover Pragyan, have been unsuccessful.

The statement noted that no signals have been received from Vikram and Pragyan and stated, "Our efforts to establish contact (with the spacecraft) will continue."

Indian Minister of Science and Technology, Jitendra Singh, also made a social media post stating that the ISRO team is making efforts to establish communication with the space exploration craft. He suggested that the reason for the failure to establish contact could be the extremely cold weather conditions, reaching as low as -150 degrees Celsius, caused by the lunar night phase that recently ended.

India's Chandrayaan-3 was sent to space on July 14th for examination of the Moon's south pole region. The craft successfully landed on the Moon on August 23rd. With this achievement, India became the fourth country to conduct a soft landing on the Moon, following the United States, the former Soviet Union, and China. Additionally, it marked the first soft landing near the "south pole" of the Moon.

The space exploration craft, weighing approximately 3.9 tons and consisting of landing platform and rover modules, was expected to operate for 14 days following its landing, with the aim of examining the lunar surface. Scientists believed that this unexplored region near the south pole of the Moon could contain significant reserves of frozen water and valuable elements.