India tries to establish contact with Chandrayaan-3 lander, rover; no signal received

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Friday said that it made efforts to establish communication with Chandrayaan-3's Vikram lander and Pragyan rover in order to determine their activation conditions. However, no signal had been received.

ISRO tweeted, "Efforts have been made to establish communication with the Vikram lander and Pragyan rover to ascertain their wake-up condition. As of now, no signals have been received from them." The space research organisation also said that efforts to establish contact will continue.

Indian Union Minister Jitendra Singh said on X, formerly Twitter, "For the last several hours, Team ISRO is making best effort to establish contact with the Vikram lander and Pragyan rover to ascertain their wake-up condition after the sunrise on Moon."

Singh added, "As of now, no signal has been received from them so far. This could be possibly because of prolonged spell of cold weather conditions upto -150 degree C during the just concluded lunar night of 14 Earth days. However, efforts to establish contact shall continue."

ISRO on Friday planned reactivate the lander and rover, which were placed in 'sleep mode' for approximately 16 Earth days before the lunar night enveloped the south pole of the Moon. The reactivation comes as the temperature on the moon rises to above minus 10 degrees Celsius, a condition that will activate the vital communication circuit known as the "wake-up circuit."

Vikram lander touched down near the south pole of the moon on 23 August, successfully completing one of the Chandrayaan-3 mission's primary objectives of soft landing on the lunar surface. Both lunar mission modules functioned effectively for around 10 Earth days. The rover entered sleep mode on September 2, followed by the lander on 4 September.

Earlier on Friday, the Indian Director of Space Applications Centre Nilesh Desai said that the reactivation of the rover and lander were postponed for Saturday. He said, "Earlier we planned to reactivate the rover and lander on the evening of 22 September, but due to some reasons we will now do it tomorrow on 23rd September. 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 added that significant data was taken by the rover and was received by ISRO. "The data has been archived and the scientists are working on it," he said.