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On celebrating Chandrayaan 3’s Moon landing, or that of Apollo

Jatan Mehta
2 min readAug 23, 2024
The Chandrayaan 3 lander Vikram imaged by the mission’s rover Pragyan on August 30, 2023. Image: ISRO

Many readers have asked me this week if I plan on blogging something today for the anniversary of Chandrayaan 3’s Moon landing, which India now celebrates as National Space Day. The answer is the same as what I do for Apollo anniversaries: Nothing.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m thrilled that as more countries explore our cosmic companion (such as South Korea), people globally are now gaining diverse ways, days, and missions to celebration lunar exploration. To that end, Chandrayaan 3 is very important to me personally too because I have watched it launch from Sriharikota, covered its landing from ISRO, interviewed its Associate Project Director for Nature, and delivered a talk on the mission at ESA in Netherlands. But I’m personally just not the kind to buzz on meta events of any sort. Heck, I might even start new years with a call for realizing how insignificant we are on a cosmic scale.

On a more serious and professional note though, with my Moon Monday blog+newsletter, I celebrate and communicate civil lunar exploration efforts by any country every single week. In India’s case, I’ve been extensively covering developments and outcomes from the Chandrayaan program for years now. And I push the need for international collaboration and outreach everywhere I can. My key driving factor across it all is for us to…

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Jatan Mehta
Jatan Mehta

Written by Jatan Mehta

Independent Space Writer & Journalist ~ Author of Moon Monday ~ Invited Speaker ~ Slow thinker ~ Human | Just read my blog: https://jatan.space 🌗

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