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India will try tonight to become the fourth country that manages to land on the surface of the Moon, thus joining the US, Russia and China (Israel tried last April but its ship crashed). The moon landing is scheduled to take place between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. on Friday, Spanish peninsular time (in India, between 1:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. on Saturday 7), as detailed by the Indian space agency (ISRO) in English) .

The Asian giant wants to enter space history with a low-cost spacecraft, the Chandrayaan-2 , which has cost slightly less than 150 million dollars (130 million euros), a much lower figure than usual in this type of space vehicles. Chandrayaan-2 (in Sanskrit Chandra means Luna and Yaan , vehicle) took off on July 22 and entered the lunar orbit on August 20 .

The spacecraft is 100% Indian and is made up of three parts - an orbiting satellite, a lunar module and a small robotic vehicle - that have traveled integrated to the lunar orbit. The satellite, which serves as a link for communications with the Earth and with the components that will perch on the surface of our satellite, will remain in the lunar orbit for a year.

The lunar module (baptized with the name of Vikram in tribute to the father of the space program of that country, Vikram A Sarabhai) will land between two craters (called Manzinus C and Simpelius N). The plan is to work for 14 days, as it is not prepared to withstand the low night temperatures that it would have to endure after those two weeks.

With regard to the small six-wheeled robotic vehicle that travels on the ship, Pragyan , the plan is that it travels 500 meters (travels at a speed of one centimeter per second) and performs various chemical analyzes, the results of which it will send to Earth The satellite orbiter. The instruments carried by the Vikram module will allow you, among other objectives, to study the atmosphere and ionosphere and seismic activity. The rover is expected to deploy a few hours after the moon landing.

The Chandrayaan-2 mission, whose launch was initially scheduled for April 2018, was to be carried out jointly with the Russian agency, Roscosmos, which eventually abandoned the project. In 2008, the Indian agency made its first lunar incursion by launching Chandrayaan 1 , a ship that orbited the Moon and whose data allowed to prepare a complete map of the topography of our satellite in three dimensions, in addition to confirming the presence of water.

Ship components

It has not transpired that the Indian ship carries biological material, as did the Israeli private ship Beresheet (Genesis in Hebrew). Last August, Wired magazine revealed that at the last minute the Arch Mission Foundation, of Nova Spivack, had included DNA samples from humans and thousands of dehydrated tardigrades (also known as water bears), capable microscopic creatures to survive in really extreme conditions, even without water, and that have survived the conditions of space (experiments have been done with them outside the International Space Station).

There is no way to know what has happened to these animals after the impact, their whereabouts or if they have survived, since it has managed to wake up water bears that had remained dehydrated for years. But, although the regulations to send space equipment to our satellite is less strict than for Mars, where you want to avoid at all costs that the planet is contaminated by bacteria or terrestrial organisms, having hidden the shipment of tardigrades outraged the scientific community.

"Putting the tardigrades there has been disconcerting," says José Antonio Rodríguez Manfredi, a researcher at the Astrobiology Center (CAB / CSIC-INTA) and one of the main scientific leaders of the meteorological stations that Spain manufactures for the Martian missions.

In addition to the rugged tardigrades, on the surface of the Moon there are biological remains of the Apollo missions that NASA carried out between 1969 and 1972. The astronauts left there bags with their droppings, in addition to the biological remains that contained the material they left behind. there, because during the beginning of the space race there was no current concern about the contamination of other celestial bodies.

In the year in which the US has celebrated the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, China has sent a robotic mission to the hidden face of our satellite (in January) and at the end of the year it plans to send another ship that will collect lunar samples to bring them to Earth .

The ship took off on July 22 ISRO

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