On the wet afternoon of 14 November 2008, Yuvraj Singh, the Indian cricketer, roared on the field as he destroyed the British attack at Rajkot. With 138 furious balls from just 78 balls, India beat England with 158 runs and the whole country erupted in celebrations but, just over 1,000 miles away in Bengaluru, the atmosphere turned tense.
The Indian fans, who are cheering for Yuvi across the country, have no idea that the Indian Space Research Organization (Isro) is about to make a big splash.
The space agency will deliberately crash a spaceship - on the Moon.
India launched the Chandrayaan mission on October 22, 2008, announcing to the world the possibility of sending missions out of Earth's orbit, to another celestial body. Until then, only four other countries had sent a mission to the lunar world - the United States, Russia, Europe, and Japan. India becomes fifth.
While Chandrayaan was a tech demonstration mission, what she did around the Moon was known to the world. Yes, he found water on the surface of the Moon and put his name in the history books. However, this task is much more than seeing with the naked eye. Hidden inside the spaceship is a 32 kg probe, whose sole purpose is to collide. They call it a lunar collision probe.
Back on the night of November 17, 2008. Around 8pm:
At 6 p.m., engineers sitting at Isro Mission Control entered the controls that removed the lunar impact probe. The silent world of the Moon is about to feel the bang. CHANDRAYAAN-3 ON FINAL ACCESS | INTERACT
From an altitude of 100 km above the lunar surface, the collider probe began its final journey.
As the probe began drifting out of Chandrayaan orbit, its rotating rockets began to work and began guiding its dive toward the Moon. Those engines roar, not to accelerate but to slow down and swerve for a perfect bump. As the spacecraft passed through the Moon's airless world, it began to see what lay beneath - a battered, ravaged world about to have another crater on its face.
Plunging toward the lunar surface, the shoebox-sized probe is not just a piece of metal but a complex machine designed to carry three instruments inside. A video imaging system, radar altimeter, and mass spectrometer so they could tell Isro what they were about to find.
While the video imaging system is designed to capture images and transmit them back to Bengaluru, a radar altimeter is built into the probe to monitor the rate of descent as it approaches the lunar surface. Meanwhile, the mass spectrometer used to analyze the lunar atmosphere is extremely sparse.
As the surface began to rise, the instruments contained within began transmitting data above the orbit, which was written to its read memory to be sent to India for further analysis.
Nearly 25 minutes after being dropped from Chandrayaan, the lunar impact probe met its fate: a hard landing on the lunar surface. The mission was completed in the same way that Yuvraj completed another mission for India - it was clinical.
Isro made history by crashing a spaceship into another world that has remained a mystery to mankind since time immemorial.
