The Vikram lander and Pragyan rover have been attempted to contact in order to determine their wake-up condition, the ISRO tweeted. No signals from them have been received as of yet. The space research organization also announced that ongoing contact-making efforts will be made.
Union Minister Jitendra Singh stated on X, a platform that was once Twitter, “For the last several hours, Team ISRO is making the best effort to establish contact with the Vikram lander and Pragyan rover to ascertain their wake-up condition after the sunrise on Moon.”
“As of right now, no signal has been received from them so far,” Singh continued. This may be feasible as a result of a lengthy period of extremely cold weather that reached temperatures of -150 degrees Celsius during the just finished lunar night of 14 Earth days. However, contact-making activities will continue.
The lander and rover were put into ‘ sleep mode’ for almost 16 Earth days prior to the lunar night enveloping the south pole of the Moon, and ISRO expected to revive them on Friday. The reactivation occurs as the moon’s temperature climbs above minus 10 degrees Celsius, triggering the activation of the “wake-up circuit,” a crucial communication channel.
On August 23, the Vikram lander successfully accomplished one of the main goals of the Chandrayaan-3 mission by softly touching down near the south pole of the moon. For roughly 10 Earth days, both lunar mission components ran efficiently. On September 2, the rover went into sleep mode, and on September 4, the lander did the same.
Nilesh Desai, director of the Space Applications Centre, announced earlier on Friday that the reactivation of the lander and rover had been postponed until Saturday. He explained, “Originally, we had planned to revive the lander and rover on the evening of September 22. However, for various reasons, we will now do it on September 23.
We have a plan to take out the lander and rover from the sleep mode and reactivate it. We had a plan to move the rover to almost 300-350 metres. But due to some reasons, we couldn’t. The rover has moved 105 metres till now. Last time, we moved it for 10 days on the surface of the moon.”
Desai stated that the rover collected important data, which was sent to ISRO. “The data has been archived, and the scientists are working on it,” he stated.
