Chandrayaan-3 success unleashed moon's role in future planetary missions: Ex-ISRO Chief Kasturirangan
Chandrayaan-3 mission has opened up the potential to use the Moon as a take-off point for future planetary missions, and bolstered India's credentials to participate in such futuristic explorations, veteran space scientist K Kasturirangan said on Thursday.
Kasturirangan said the soft-landing and ability to maneouvre after touchdown to explore the neighbourhood and all that goes along with it including the understanding of the entire process have given the ISRO a «total capability».
The futuristic planetary explorations are going to dominate the humankind's activity in the 21st century.
The latest lunar missions is «one of the very key milestones of ISRO's journey in the last 50 years because for the first time you have comprehensively demonstrated the ability of the space programme of ISRO to land an object outside the earth, into another body of the solar system», the former ISRO Chairman told PTI.
The mission's lander module, 'Vikram' successfully touched down on the lunar surface on Wednesday, with Rover 'Pragyan' later rolling into the lunar surface to conduct various experiments.
«I think it's a very unique capability», Kasturirangan said.
India on Wednesday became the first country to land a craft near the south pole, and the fourth--after the US, China and erstwhile USSR to master the soft-landing technology.
«Exploring the south pole is very important because of the fact that sunlight does not come much, and since the moon has stopped evolving after two billion years, the south pole is a pristine region which gives you telltale signs of almost two billion years of uninterrupted existence, without other kinds of radiations and so on and so forth», Kasturirangan said.
«There is a good possibility that water--if it
