The moon is an astronomical masterpiece.
India’s latest mission to the moon is doing some rather fantastic science right now. No, not the Vikram lander: lest we forget, that made a hard landing in the moon’s south polar region at the beginning of September; its remains cannot yet be located by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).
No, I’m talking about the orbiter the Chandrayaan-2 mission successfully deployed before the lander and its rover made its doomed descent.
According to a recent press release from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), all of the orbiter’s instruments are operating as planned, from the camera designed to create 3D maps of its surface to the X-ray sleuth that’s keeping an eye on the Sun’s outbursts and its ghostly corona.
The orbiter is also equipped with a rather fancy camera. Conducting its astrodynamical pirouette at a height of around 100 kilometres (62 miles), the Orbiter High Resolution Camera (OHRC) is able to see objects on the surface as small as 32 centimetres (12.6 inches) across when peering at a three-kilometre (1.9-mile) stretch of the dusty desolation below. This gives it a resolution better than that of NASA’s own LRO, itself at a lower orbit than the Chandrayaan-2 camera.
With that in mind, the ISRO has been keen to show off what it calls the “sharpest images ever from a lunar orbiter platform,” sharing a series of small craters and boulders hiding inside the Boguslawsky E crater, a 14-kilometre (8.7-mile) scar near the moon’s south pole. This crater is part of a family of Bohuslawsky craters (named, if you were wondering, after a German astronomer), the largest of which is Boguslawsky B, a whopping 63 kilometres (39 miles) across.
A clear-as-day view of one of a cornucopia of craters in the moon's south polar region.
There’s nothing particularly special about these craters, nested in or around the master Boguslawsky crater, itself coming in at 95 kilometres (59 miles) in diameter. Saying that, a robot sent by the Space Council of the Russian Academy of Sciences is planning to land there in a few years’ time and poke its four-billion-year-old geology about – just one of many hints that we could be looking at the genesis of a future space race.
There's water somewhere down there.
As it happens, there’s a lot of water locked up in the austral arena of our pale celestial companion. Although estimates vary as to how much is concealed down there, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that all kinds of space agencies and companies, as well as a plethora of planetary scientists and astrobiologists, want in. Part of the Chandrayaan-2’s mission is to try to quantify that with some of its observational tech from up above.
The orbiter’s camera – half-designed to spot the Vikram lander had it actually nailed its soft landing, half-designed to take scientifically interesting photographs of the moon – is indubitably giving us a great visual reminder of the science that India’s second lunar mission is undertaking, despite the lander’s demise. But it’s also underscoring how keen everyone is to spot that life-affirming compound hiding in the shadows of a dead volcanic orb, one that could ultimately kickstart a resource battle the likes of which the solar system has never seen.
