Prof. Santosh Vadawale

The soft landing of the Chandrayaan-3 Vikram lander on 23rd August 2023 was a historic moment for India. The next 12 days involved an absolutely incredible journey on the Moon. This journey was the culmination of another incredible journey - my association with Chandrayaan for the past 20 years! In this talk, I will try to share some of the exciting moments of both these journeys. I will begin with a brief historical account of our experiments onboard Chandrayaan missions and proceed with the challenges faced in realizing, calibrating, and operating our Chandrayaan payloads. Finally, I will describe the journey of the Chandrayaan-3 rover as well as the scientific operation of APXS on the lunar surface and discuss the novel results provided by the APXS.