https://twitter.com/isro/status/1696792992718442558

Finally, the Pragyan rover has photographed the lander.
Also visible are the ChaSTE surface temperatures instrument and the ISLA seismic experiment.


Chandrayaan Lander seen from the Rover

Click to view attachment

deleted, others have already posted the information

The lander has a steerable X-band antenna. The square-shaped thing in the upper right corner, I suppose.

Bringing some colors to this beautiful picture of Vikram lander by the rover.
Colors based on the ISRO website gallery.

A second image that I colorized, taken a few hours later on the Moon.

Have we located the landing point on LRO or terrestrial imagery yet?
From discussions I've narrowed it to between 2 or 3 craters.

--Bill

The lander was directly observed by Chandrayaan-2 quickly after landing. See here.

Great job! The photo looks very natural, can you share how you made it? Thanks!

Video of APXS operation released on ISRO website.

https://www.isro.gov.in/media_isro/video/ch...ectroscope.webm

As you know we don't have a lot of detail to be used for mapping activities. This is my first guess at what a map might look like. I'll get a scale etc. later.

The place where the drive was blocked by a crater is uncertain, and I have seen a different interpretation from our friend Shan:

https://twitter.com/Ramanean/status/1696872872663486945

He may be right.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Thanks! I colorized the B&W picture on Photoshop: I added a transparent layer in "Color" mode, put the right colors on it, played with saturation and that's it!

OK I will try it, thank you!

Bonjour,

Another video of Pragyan looking for his way

https://twitter.com/i/status/1697156752641536030

https://www.isro.gov.in/Ch3_Rambha-LP_near-...ace_Plasma.html
New camera view.

Edit: Nevermind it is just zoomed in view from camera next to ramp.

neo56 pointed out (post #137 above) that the horizons in the first two Pragyan images could be combined to make a mini-panorama. The foregrounds don't match so it only works with the horizon features.

Near the left end of that mini-pan there is a trio of craters. I noticed they are also seen on one of the recent images of the lander, so another image can be added to the panorama. There is a second lander image where the lander blocks a different bit of the horizon so it could be added as well, but the geometry is tricky so I haven't tried it yet.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Experimenting further, I added parts of the second image and played with a reprojection to try to match with orbital images. I don't really know how much of the horizon is visible here so treat this as an experiment, not true geometry.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Chandrayaan-3 seismograph detecting rover motion... and maybe a moonquake?
https://www.isro.gov.in/Ch3_ILSA_Listens_Landing_Site.html

As of a few minutes ago LROC had not released an image of Chandrayaan's landing site.
LROC's resolution is 0.5 m/pixel and Pragyan is under 1m in length/width. Its wheels are very narrow, so I think it will be quite difficult to identify any tracks.

Pragyan's full traverse route has not been publicly shared, to my knowledge. But looking at the image of backtracking due to a large (4m) crater, a boulder on a further away crater's rim set me wondering.

So here is a wild guess, a total speculation, just for the fun of it. Any comments are very welcome!

Click to view attachment

Fernando

Hi Nogal - I think the hills on the horizon in the image you show are on the south horizon, not the east.

Phil

Gallery updated with images from rover.
https://www.isro.gov.in/chandrayaan3_gallery.html

ISRO's twitter has provided us with a route map for Pragyan.

Thanks for pointing it out Phil.
Fernando

From ISRO's twitter.
https://twitter.com/isro/status/1698010732128764164

ISRO has Xed (twitted) again:

Chandrayaan-3 Mission:
The Rover completed its assignments.

It is now safely parked and set into Sleep mode.
APXS and LIBS payloads are turned off.
Data from these payloads is transmitted to the Earth via the Lander.

Currently, the battery is fully charged.
The solar panel is oriented to receive the light at the next sunrise expected on September 22, 2023.
The receiver is kept on.

Hoping for a successful awakening for another set of assignments!
Else, it will forever stay there as India's lunar ambassador.

Fernando

The route map from ISRO is great to have but I am a bit unsure about the scale. The scale bar says 50 m x 50 m, which I presume means the bar represents 50 m and the scale is the same in both N-S and E-W directions. You might say all maps should have the same scale in both directions but that's not true of, for instance, most parts of a simple cylindrical (equirectangular) map.

OK, so what about the statement that the total traverse is 101.4 m? The only way that seems to match the scale bar is if 101.4 m is the straight line distance from Vikram to Pragyan at the end of its travels. The actual distance driven could be nearly twice that.

Presumably each individual drive is shown by a line of different colour. Lets hope we see some more Pragyan images soon.

Phil

Would it work if the full dimensions of the map were 50x50m, and the "total traverse" was the total path length? Or perhaps the radius of the large yellow circle was 50m?

I get the visual impression that this path was drawn by hand, so perhaps it isn't very accurate.

Why didn't I think to do this before? I compared it with Jake's map, and of course Fred was right, the radius of the circle is 50 m. That makes the total distance driven look like 101.4 m. So the way the scale bar is labelled is misleading.

Phil

Have there been any LRO passes over the landing site in last 10 days?

Yes, there was a flyover in sunlight about 2 days after landing. No release of details yet but there is no urgency since the OHRC image was already published. LRO will be a bit less detailed than OHRC but would show the rover on the surface.

Phil

Thanks Phil.

Also they performed a hop!
https://twitter.com/isro/status/1698570774385205621


Scott might have exact time of event.
https://twitter.com/coastal8049/status/1698578973410972089


Before and after images from lander camera.
https://imgur.com/a/6UyQUxB

Bonjour,

Continued operations

https://twitter.com/isro/status/16986186947...618694795219401

Lunar surface pre and post Chandrayaan 3 hop test.

One thing we can say for shure of Indian missions, they embrace the challenge... i hope they come with a aggressive timeline to push things up a little.

They released 3D anaglyph image made using rover navcam pairs

https://www.isro.gov.in/chandrayaan3_gallery.html



Edit: Adding no glass version.

Chandrayaan-3 landing site from LRO (link)

Very nice. Here I have cropped it and rotated to put north near the top (not exactly - see the north arrow on one of those images). This is a late morning image and Pragyan would have been close to the lander. I can't see it. The image was taken off-nadir so the view is oblique and lower resolution than will be possible with a vertical view. I have very roughly reprojected it to make craters look circular.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Chandrayaan-3 lander has been imaged by the Dual-frequency Synthetic Aperture Radar (DFSAR) instrument onboard the Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter on 6 September 2023.
https://www.isro.gov.in/Ch3Lander_imagedby_Ch2SAR.html
Edit: Rough comparison https://imgur.com/a/2z6XFGx

I compared the horizon panorama (very roughly reprojected... north up but not sure I have the azimuth range correct) with the LRO image to identify some small craters. I hope we get some more rover images so the horizon features can be extended. I am still not able to identify the hill northeast of the lander.

Phil

Click to view attachment

KPLO also imaged Chandrayaan-3 landing site on 27 August.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jreJDvK5FJs
https://www.instagram.com/p/CxFORfUyzK9/
https://www.instagram.com/p/CxFRROFvgjT/

Edit: Press release.
https://www.kari.re.kr/kplo/danuri/multi/mu...aView.do?idx=41

The sun will rise at the Chandrayaan 3 landing site, Shiv Shakti Point, round about now. It has to get higher in the sky before any return to operations of Vikram and Pragyan, if that is even possible. I am doubtful but the attempt will be made in a few days. It relies entirely on Vikram, because if Pragyan wakes up but Vikram doesn't we will never know - only the lander can communicate with us.

Meanwhile, a bit of detective work.

One of the rover images looked across a foreground crater and out to the eastern horizon. Here is a version of the image very roughly projected for perspective:

Click to view attachment

The horizon features establish the pointing reasonably well. So here is an orbital image showing that camera field of view:

Click to view attachment

And here is a detail of the ISRO traverse map with the field of view plotted on it. Small craters on the bottom edge can be matched to confirm this (I don't show them here). The large crater has a small crater in the foreground on the upper edge of the image.

Click to view attachment

From this I believe that the location of the southern end of the traverse in this area is not drawn correctly on the ISRO map. The rover has to be somewhere near the location shown by my two lines. It might not be exactly right but I don't see that the rover could be where the ISRO map suggests. The view of the eastern horizon from the ISRO position would look north of the foreground crater, not across it.

Phil

It made it through!


https://twitter.com/coastal8049/status/1704990165008302213

https://twitter.com/coastal8049/status/1704990946990170237

https://twitter.com/coastal8049/status/1704991753340854522

https://twitter.com/coastal8049/status/1704992559138058726

https://twitter.com/coastal8049/status/1704993985511706882

Apologies for premature celebrations.. Scott found out it was just LRO transmission..


https://twitter.com/coastal8049/status/1705034607861887062


https://twitter.com/coastal8049/status/1705035854157337077

The airless Lunar environment is rough to work In from just the temperature extremes. But the deeper we get into the polar regions the closer we'll get to a zone of equitable average temperature and no "noon-midnight" extremes.

Dr. K V Sriram (Director, LEOS) on LEOS-Electro optic Sensors and Instruments for Chandrayaan-3 gave a presentation on 22 September. It had new stereo pair from rover navcams.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ6p0Heqf_E&t=2577s

This rock in middle is right next to a big crater.

Thank you for letting us see that.

The slide from the video showed the view of the lander that we have already seen as well as the two new ones. When I compare them... it looks like the object on the horizon of the rocks stereo image is the top of the lander, just visible over a small local rise in the terrain.

Phil

Click to view attachment

And here I was thinking they are just very strange outcrop of rocks. That indeed looks like top of lander, really nice catch.

There's been an addition of around 40 new files at the Chandrayaan-2 OHRC page, and a hefty chunk of them seem to focus on the Chandrayaan-3 lander/rover.

Edit to add: most of the files around the lander site seem to pre-date it, with only this post-landing image to go at so far:

Click to view attachment

Another Navcam pair from IAC 2023 presentation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iY9qIBTZV8E&t=1008s
Showing the 4 meter crater encountered on 27 August.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZRJ54SKUX8

This link is to a very interesting talk by Santosh Vadawale of the Physical Research Lab in Ahmedabad, the PI for the APXS on the Pragyan rover.

It goes from the beginning of discussions about the instrument to flight operations. Among the interesting points, the fixed solar panel on Pragyan plus the motion of the Sun across the sky originally dictated a counterclockwise traverse after deployment. That route was blocked by craters so a 'backwards' path was selected, requiring a 180 degree turn after every drive to charge the battery. Also a map of locations of the APXS measurements (of which more later). The hop at the end of the lunar day was preceded by a short test burn.

Phil