India’s Chandrayaan-3 rover confirms sulphur on moon’s south pole

India’s moon rover has confirmed the presence of sulphur and detected several other elements on the lunar south pole, says the country’s space agency.

Last week, India became the first country to land a craft near the largely unexplored south pole, and just the fourth nation to land on the moon.

“The Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) instrument onboard Chandrayaan-3 Rover has made the first-ever in-situ measurements on the elemental composition of the lunar surface near the south pole,” the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said in a statement dated Monday.

“These in-situ measurements confirm the presence of sulphur in the region unambiguously, something that was not feasible by the instruments onboard the orbiters,” it said.

The spectrographic analysis also confirmed the presence of aluminium, calcium, iron, chromium and titanium on the lunar surface, ISRO added, with additional measurements showing the presence of manganese, silicon and oxygen.

India has been steadily matching the achievements of other space programmes – active since the 1960s – at a fraction of their cost, despite suffering some setbacks.

The Chandrayaan-3 mission cost an estimated $75m – less than the budget of Hollywood space thriller, Gravity.

Four years ago, the previous Indian lunar mission failed during its final descent, in what was seen at the time as a huge setback for the programme.

Chandrayaan-3 has captivated public attention since launching nearly six weeks ago in front of thousands of cheering spectators, and its successful touchdown on the moon last week came just days after Russia’s Luna-25 lander crashed in the same region.

Russia’s head of the state-controlled space corporation Roscosmos attributed the failure to the lack of expertise due to the long break in lunar research that followed the last Soviet mission to the moon in 1976.