ISRO identifies location for Chandrayaan-4 lander

The Chandrayaan-4 mission is at least two years away, but ISRO has identified a location in the moon’s south polar region to land its lander.

The Union government has approved the Chandrayaan-4 mission, designed as a lunar sample return mission, and it will be India’s most complex lunar project yet.

“We are targeting 2028 for Chandrayaan-4,” ISRO chairman V. Narayanan had said earlier.

According to ISRO officials, they had targeted four locations of the Mons Mouton (MM) and found one of them suitable for landing on the lunar surface.

Mons Mouton is a region on the moon.

Officials said they had identified locations: MM-1, MM-3, MM-4 and MM-5. Of them, MM-4 was chosen for the landing.

“The four sites in the Mons Mouton region were fully characterized with respect to terrain characteristics using high-resolution Orbiter High Resolution Camera (OHRC) multi-view image datasets,” they said.

It was found that an area of ​​one km by one km around MM-4 “contains the least hazard rate, an average slope of 5 degrees, an average altitude of 5,334 meters and the largest number of risk-free grids of 24 meters to 24 meters. Therefore, MM-4 can be considered as the potential site of the Chandrayaan-4 mission,” officials said.

Chandrayaan-4 consists of a Propulsion Module (PM), a Descender Module (DM), an Ascender Module (AM), a Transfer Module (TM) and a Re-entry Module (RM).

The combined DM and AM stack will soft land on the lunar surface at the designated location.

The soft main landing will be carried out through an appropriate descent trajectory (AM+DM) with navigation, guidance and control system, while the safe landing can be ensured by proper selection of the landing site that meets all the limitations of the Lander.