Chandrayaan’s Pragyan rover safely navigates around 4m crater during lunar mission.

BENGALURU: Isro on Monday announced that the Chandrayaan-3 rover, Pragyan, encountered a 4-meter diameter crater on August 27, causing it to change its path. The rover was commanded to retrace its path and is now safely heading on a new path. This is the second crater encountered by Pragyan, with the first one being a smaller crater with a depth of approximately 100 mm. Isro scientists made the decision to avoid the larger crater and choose a safe path. Rover operations on the Moon are semi-autonomous, requiring commands to be sent from Earth. For every path planning, the rover’s onboard navigation camera data is downloaded to the ground for the generation of a digital elevation model (DEM), and then the ground and mechanisms teams decide on the path to take and uplink the command for the rover to follow. The movement of Pragyan is riddled with challenges, and each movement requires overcoming multiple obstacles. The rover’s maximum DEM is limited to 5 meters, meaning it can only cover that distance with each movement. The turnaround time between each movement operation is approximately five hours. The rover’s power and data communication capabilities are also limited, which requires careful planning and execution of each movement. Isro has already successfully completed multiple rover movements as of Sunday. Pragyan is equipped with miniature systems that are state-of-the-art but have certain limitations. Despite these challenges, Isro is confident in the good work being done by Pragyan on the Moon.