Featured Image Credit: ISRO
Topics: Science, Space, Technology, India
Emily Brown
A spacecraft from India made history when it touched down on the lunar south pole, but its achievements didn't stop there as its rover went on to make a groundbreaking discovery.
India's Chandrayaan-3 Vikram lander was the first craft ever to land on the lunar south pole when it arrived in August 2023, carrying with it a rover called Pragyan.
Pragyan was tasked with developing and demonstrating new technologies required for Inter planetary missions, and it quickly got to work exploring the previously unknown land.
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Using an instrument called the Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS), which was created by the Laboratory for Electro-Optics Systems in Bangalore, Pragyan was able to probe the lunar surface and fire laser pulses at any samples worth observing.
Firing lasers at the samples makes them vaporize - but while this may seem counterintuitive, the clever instrument is actually able to then pick up light emitted from that plasma, and analyze its wavelengths to determine what elements it consists of.
Within a week, Pragyan had showed its worth as one of these samples revealed traces of sulfur in the soil of the south pole.
The rover also detected aluminum, iron, calcium, chromium, titanium, manganese, oxygen and silicon.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) confirmed the discovery, explaining the laser detector made 'the first-ever in-situ - in the original space - measurements on the elemental composition of the surface near the south pole'.
"These in-situ measurements confirm the presence of sulphur in the region unambiguously, something that was not feasible by the instruments onboard the orbiters," ISRO said.
Back on Earth, finding sulphur might not seem like such a big deal. If anything, you might just complain about the smell.
However, Sara Russell, a professor of planetary sciences at the Natural History Museum in London, explained the importance of the discovery at the lunar south pole.
She told the MailOnline: "Sulphur is usually bonded to important metals like iron and nickel, and these may be important ores that could be used by future astronauts to enable them to live and work on the moon.
"We already know that the moon contains sulphur, from our analyses of rocks returned from the moon by space missions, and from lunar meteorites.
"What we don't really know is the distribution and abundance of sulphur on the moon. This has really important implications for understanding the way the moon evolved."
In addition to discovering sulphur on the South Pole, the rover also snapped pictures of its surroundings to offer greater insight to the environment.