The Vikram lander of Chandrayaan-3 landed on the near side of the moon. The near side refers to the portion of the moon — about 60% — that is visible to us.
Key facts
- It is always the same side that is visible from Earth because the moon takes the same time to rotate about its axis as it does to circle around the Earth. Tidal locking results in the Moon rotating about its axis in about the same time it takes to orbit Earth. Except for libration, this results in the Moon keeping the same face turned toward Earth.
- However this doesn’t imply that the half the moon is in perpetual darkness.
- The ‘new moon’ or when the moon is invisible from Earth is the time when the other ‘far side’ of the moon is bathed in sunlight and continues to receive light for nearly a fortnight.
- The ‘dark side’ is thus dark only in the sense that it was mysterious and its various topographical features hidden until the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 in 1959 photographed it.
- The major difference between the near and far sides is that the near side is relatively smoother and has many more ‘maria’ or large volcanic plains compared to the far side. On the far side however, there are huge craters, thousands of kilometres wide, which have likely resulted from collisions with asteroids.
