Chandrayaan-3 bags credit for first-ever in-situ measurement of Lunar Surface, revealing insights about harbouring water-ice on Moon

Chennai, March 15 -- India's Chandrayaan-3 ChaSTE payload onboard Vikram Lander has taken the credit for the first-ever in-situ measurement of the temperature of the Moon's surface, down to a depth of ten centimetres, at the Southern higher latitude.

So far, the temperature measurements from the subsurface of the Moon by the Apollo 15 and 17 missions focussed to a larger depth of few meters, but direct measurement of temperatures within the topmost fluffy layer is not available.

However, in order to assess the propagation of the solar heat flux down to the lower layers of the Moon's soil, one needs to probe first few centimetres down the Moon's surface (the epi-layer), which is exactly the unique feat achieved by the ChaSTE payload in ...