Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced pm August 26 that the point where the Chandrayaan-3 lander touched down on the lunar surface on 23 August would be named Shiv Shakti.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi also declared August 23 as the National Space Day to commemorate the remarkable achievement of Chandrayaan-3’s landing on the moon.
Key points
- PM Modi’s big announcement came at the ISRO Telemetry Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) in Bengaluru where he arrived to greet the scientists behind the historic Chandrayaan-3 mission.
- He added that there was a discussion over naming the spot where Chandrayaan-2 crashed in 2019 as well, but they believed that should happen only once the next mission succeeds in soft-landing. That point has now been named “Tiranga”.
- After a 40-day journey into space, Chandrayaan-3 mission successfully touched down on the lunar surface on 23 August wehrein the Prime Minister had joined the ISRO team at Mission Operations Complex (MOX) at ISTRAC virtually from Johannesburg, where he was attending the 15th BRICS Summit.
- The Moon does not come under the jurisdiction of any one country – it’s what makes global exploration and landing missions possible.
- In 1966, the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs came out with the Outer Space Treaty. However, the Treaty does not talk about naming sites on the Moon.
- Following the 2008 mission Chandrayaan-1, a spot where the probe crashed (as it was meant to for the purposes of the mission), was named “Jawahar Sthal” after the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
