The Chandrayaan lunar landing and how it could impact India’s brain drain

Julie Gould: 00:28

On the 23rd of August 2023, India became the fourth country to successfully land a spacecraft on the southern side of the Moon: Chandrayaan-3, which translates to moon vehicle three. But why do we need to study the Moon? Well, other than the obvious, it’s super interesting. It’s also because it’s the Earth’s sister. It was formed at the same time from the same nebula. And it’s made of the same things. For example, we can find certain things on the surface of the moon that you can only find deeper down in the Earth. So studying the moon often tells us a lot about the Earth itself. So to reflect on this Indian lunar mission, the Nature Careers editor Jack Leeming spoke with astrophysicist Somak Raychaudhury, the current Vice Chancellor of Ashoka University in India. Raychaudhury started his career in astrophysics in the UK studying at the University of Oxford before completing a PhD at Cambridge University. He took on his first teaching post, which he held for more than a decade, at Birmingham University before returning to India. Because his career has spanned different continents Raychaudhury has had the opportunity to be involved in several international space missions, for example, working with NASA on the Chandra satellite project space telescope, and with India Sun mission to develop that ultraviolet camera.

Somak Raychaudhury: 01:46

In this conversation, Jack and Somak Raychaudhury talk about Chandrayaan-3 and what data it has collected, but also why it is important for India to have done this. They also discuss the history of India’s space programme and how India is developing its space industry, which leads them on to the launch of its solar satellite, Aditya. The second half of the conversation is about brain drain in India, and how they’re dealing with this.

Somak Raychaudhury: 02:12

This interview is part of the Nature spotlight on India, a supplement to Nature covering the country’s scientific and economic development. For more, you can go to nature.com. Somak starts the conversation by telling us about the Chandrayaan-3’s history and purpose,

Somak Raychaudhury: 02:28

Right. So this is the third mission to the moon. The first one was in 2008, Chanrayaan-1 which went on an orbit around the moon did not attempt to land but it had a couple of experiments to look for water on the moon. And it found signatures of water from going around the moon. So that gave us indication that one could a) get vehicle in orbit around the moon -- and of course not many other countries have done that -- and b) the ISRO which is India’s space organisation had the capability of launching a vehicle that did this very complex manoeuvre of going around the earth and to the moon in a very long orbit, which actually brought down costs the low cost mission. So it was most mostly an exploratory mission.

Jack Leeming: 03:15

And then three years ago, Chandrayaan-2 attempted to land a lander vehicle on the moon, and that lander crashed in the last minute or so of its landing procedure, it was going alright, but it didn’t manage to land properly. The orbiter part of Chandrayaan-2 is still in orbit around the moon and is done very good work; it’s still doing very good work. So Chandrayaan-3 was then sent as a follow up where the number of experiments on the orbiter itself was kept at a minimum because Jamie on to is already operational. But it was mostly sent as a vehicle to be landed on the moon. And in the last few years, there’s been a lot of discussion and analysis on what happened to Chandrayaan-2 so that it did not land and then the analysis brought up quite a lot of very interesting points, all to do with how the hardware could be improved, how the software could be improved, how the landing procedure could be improved, things like that.

Jack Leeming: 04:21

It’s important because this is one of the first missions to land a near the South Pole of the moon, the southern hemisphere of the moon; it’s kind of the far side of the Moon is largely unexplored. And so this was as far south on the moon as anybody’s gone. And so this one Chandrayaan-3 landed finally successfully, at a place which was not far from where Chandrayaan-2 had been unsuccessful, and did its work for 14 days, which is the length of the lunar day. Since then it has gone into hibernation. We didn’t expect to get it back. But the 14 day mission has sent back a wealth of information. And all the instruments that worked that were on the lander worked very well. So we would call it a very successful mission, not just landing; it did another interesting thing which is that it it did a little hop -- it took off and landed back in again in preparation for future missions, which will actually collect stuff from the surface of the moon and take off from the surface of the moon.

Jack Leeming: 05:22

And so you’ve learned that it can hop, so the future Chandrayaan-4, maybe we’ll be able to hop off and on.

Somak Raychaudhury: 05:31

Yeah, but the scientific instruments that were on this lander has so far worked very well, of course, the data has been analysed, but it managed, everything managed to work very well. So I think the difference between the three and the two was amazing, the fact that it had quite a lot of things built into it, to make it accident proof, so that it demonstrated that it actually could land and roam around. So there’s a rover that roam around on the surface of the moon,

Jack Leeming: 05:57

Can you give us some examples of a kind of the kind of data that the spacecraft collected?

Somak Raychaudhury: 06:03

For example, the Chandrayaan-2, one of the instruments had shown very convincingly the presence of water in the southern hemisphere of the moon, but it only talked about water being there, we didn’t know where it was, there is was always a suspicion that it would be in the shadowed parts of these places, the temperature goes down to as low as minus 200 degrees. And so that’s where water is supposed to be. So the part of the rover’s experiments were to travel around in an area, try to figure out whether they could actually find water. So that’s one of the missions, we don’t know what’s been found yet the data is being analysed.

Somak Raychaudhury: 06:45

But in addition to that, part of the experiments were to figure out what the composition is of the thin layer of atmosphere that the moon has. The moon has a very thin layer of air, and it’s also full of charged particles. So, there was one experiment that looked at what kind of charged particles there are in the in the atmosphere, another looked for various gases that could be in the atmosphere. Then this part of experiments also looked at the composition of the moon soil in the southern hemisphere, and looked at the presence of certain minerals in the soil. It also very critically looked at -- and this we’ve seen the data to be very good -- looked at mild vibrations on the surface of the moon.

Somak Raychaudhury: 07:29

These are the moonquakes, like the earthquakes, mild moonquakes. So there are a lot of theories about what causes moonquakes. It could be the constant bombardment of the moon surface because the moon doesn’t have a protective atmosphere, bombardment of material from outside, that also causes the moon to vibrate quite a bit. But like the Earth, it could be from within -- we don’t know what’s inside the moon. So it could be volcanic activity, lava activity from within the moon, that would cause mild tremors. All of these are important with the view to one day, having a building having colonies on the moon, right? If you want us to have establishments on the moon, not just to live there, but maybe as a stop on the way to other places in the solar system, then we would like to know what’s near the surface. So these are all experiments designed to start this kind of exploration.

Jack Leeming: 08:28

I guess that’s why it’s significant from the perspective of space researchers. That’s why that mission’s important: to learn that sort of stuff. Why is it important for India? India is only the fourth country to do something like this.

Somak Raychaudhury: 08:38

For India, it had more of a way of trying to test the technology that the Indian Space Programme is capable of. The Indian Space Programme has been on since the early 60s. And so in 50 years, what has it achieved? It has independent launchers that is capable of launching complex satellites and payloads up to four or five tonnes in weight, which is significant, it also can produce low cost missions to go to the moon and now we know to Mars and on the way you have very complex manoeuvres that can go around these particular celestial bodies and also to land on the moon.

Somak Raychaudhury: 09:19

So, it is important for India to demonstrate a lot of this in addition to the science, because the space industry is growing very fast. The international space industry is now worth more than $600 billion and India currently plays a very small part of it and you would like to play a very important role and achievements like this go a long way in doing that to both to show Indians I mean ourselves that we are capable of doing it, but also to show the world that there is a lot of space ready industry that there which can take part in international projects.

Jack Leeming: 09:56

Understand that recently India started to open up its space research sector to private investment. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Somak Raychaudhury: 10:05

What India has done with the global space industry in mind, India joined the Artemis accord recently, right. So Artemis is a global Moon project, which involves a lot of the industrialised countries around the world, who are thinking in the long term about missions on the moon and also activities on the moon. So that’s one part of it. And this is one of the largest coordinated space projects that people have thought about. India also has ambitions of manned flights having its own space station and sending astronauts into space and maybe landing on various parts of the solar system. That’s one part. And then because the Indian space establishment is maybe one of the top five in the world. And this almost a trillion dollar industry worldwide, which is rapidly expanding has very little from India in it. So India recognised that because the Indian space activities have been traditionally done by the government-owned Indian Space Research Organisation department of space, the government of India is not capable of handling such a huge job globally. And of course, since the global space industry is moving towards being led by private entities, governments can’t necessarily always interact with private entities. So it’s very clear that if India wants to play an important role in the global industry, the activities we’ll have to open up to the private sector. And I think it’s only time before we can see major space players coming up amongst the industry in India.

Jack Leeming: 11:40

Now, you mentioned that Indian Space Research and these public organisation started in around the 1960s. What does that space heritage come from? How did it sort of start?

Somak Raychaudhury: 11:50

In the 60s, the missions were technology driven. And even though the Indian Space Programme had started, then it wasn’t really enough to do the exploration of the solar system. The Indian Space Technology started towards doing remote sensing the photography from space of weather systems, agricultural land, and this was more driven by India’s needs for the space programme to serve the key priorities of India, one of the main priorities being agriculture. So Indian agriculture has been amazingly helped by the space mission in India by looking at the terrain of the land, by changing communication between various parts of India, looking at big programmes on natural disasters, and predicting them, how to manage them and things like that.

Somak Raychaudhury: 12:39

And so, this was the focus of India and it wasn’t really going to the moon. What has now happened is that as a result of the very robust work of weather satellites of remote sensing satellites and then communication satellites, from the 60s onwards, India has now gained its own launcher programme and science programme. And scientists got interested in India’s Space Programme starting from the 90s onwards, and India’s first scientific satellite was launched only in 2015 astrosat, which has five telescopes on it. And India’s interest in science from space, which Chandrayaan and Aditya are all part of comes from a very long tradition of Indian scientists and astrophysicists who’ve been working on ground based work on astronomy trying to understand the universe. Now having a ways of sending telescopes up into space above the atmosphere.

Somak Raychaudhury: 13:34

You know, there are many branches of astronomy that cannot be done from the earth. And these are things like ultraviolet astronomy, infared astronomy, gamma ray astronomy, things like that. And big systems like NASA and JAXA, from Japan, they have been sending up some of these amazing space based observatories for a long time. And ESA, for example, in the European Space Agency. Now India’s starts getting into this only in the last few years and the Chandrayaan mission are part of that just extends India’s interest in producing these amazing space vehicles that can go and explore the solar system. But with now, scientists taking an active interest in it and giving it purpose.

Jack Leeming: 14:15

Yes. Well, my next question, actually, so we’re speaking, a month to the day that Aditya launched, I think. That’s a solar observatory. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Somak Raychaudhury: 14:26

Yes and I’m pretty excited about it. I was there at the launch of Aditya-1.

Jack Leeming: 14:31

Oh! Tell us a bit about the launch actually, if you wouldn’t mind. Where was it?

Somak Raychaudhury: 14:34

I was launched from the same launching pad in the eastern coast of India from Sriharikota. And it’s a very complex launch because Aditya-1 goes not around the Earth, but eventually when it reaches there in four months’ time, it will orbit the first Lagrangian point which is about 1% of the way to the sun. So in the in the Earth-Sun system there are five parking spaces. Called the Lagrangian points where if you put a satellite, it stays there because the gravitational force of the Earth and the Sun on it balance out. And so the first Lagrangian point is somewhere where this mission is going.

Somak Raychaudhury: 15:11

And that’s where you can stay for a long time. And you can monitor the Sun 24 hours without going into the Earth’s shadow. So once it gets there, and using two instruments, one is images, the disk of the Sun at the highest resolution, so far done in the ultraviolet. So in the ultraviolet Sun is very active, it doesn’t look very like a boring yellow disk, it actually in the ultraviolet, you can see constant solar activity happening on the surface of the sun, because sun is very highly magnetic on the sun, and so that a magnetic storm is going on all the time. And you can image them, the storms then generate a lot of charged particles that are rejected into its corona. The corona is many times larger than the Sun itself.

Somak Raychaudhury: 15:51

And the interesting thing is that the Sun’s surface is about 6000 degrees, but its corona is more than a million degrees hot. And we don’t understand why the surrounding the sun, which stretches to about five, six times the size of the Sun, is a million degree hot plasma, and it’s full of charged particles that come out of these solar storms. Now, a lot of these then travel to the earth. And these are called coronal mass ejections that travel all the way to the Earth, of course, it goes everywhere in space, but the ones that come to the earth are responsible for causing the aurouri in the poles. So it’s beautiful. But on the other hand, as these charged particles come and bombard the Earth’s atmosphere, it hits a lot of our communication satellites, anything that’s in the upper atmosphere, and causes damage. So as the number of things that we are dependent on, which are in orbit around the Earth increases, it is very important for us to know how the Sun’s activities affect the Earth’s atmosphere.

Jack Leeming: 17:02

And that’s what Atitya is going to be doing. Pun not intended, what was the atmosphere like when the probe left the Earth?

Somak Raychaudhury: 17:09

Yeah, that was wonderful. This is my second launch from the same place. I was there at the Astrosat launch eight years ago. But this was wonderful. It’s a great experience, you actually, you take part in the countdown, indoors, you’re sitting in the control room, looking at the countdown, and then a minute before the launch itself, you rush out to the terrace to see the thing coming up. And it’s very loud. And seeing a launch and being there is a wonderful experience. And of course, then you have your fingers crossed for an hour or so. And hope that it will actually go through all the different stages that he has to go through by shedding different parts of the rockets. And finally, the satellite going into free space.

Jack Leeming: 17:50

Now, slight change of tone -- but I’m really interested in your opinions on this. One of the things that has really come out of our reporting on India so far for this special on India, is the sense of brain drain. The sense of brain drain, whilst India awards, lots of lots of PhDs to people, a lot of those people then leave and go elsewhere and take that training and education with them. Now it strikes me -- and I know we’ve spoken about this before -- big international reputation and international programmes like India space mission might be a really powerful way to retain that talent or to draw talent back into India. What do you think about that, in your position as a Vice Chancellor of a university?

Somak Raychaudhury: 18:27

it’s a very important part of it. I mean, in my generation, when we went into university, we knew that if one had to do research at all, even work at the forefront of these technologies, I wanted to go abroad, and I went to the UK to study and then went and worked in the US and worked for agencies like NASA and ESA and things like that. And if you look at the forefront of scientific research in most subjects. And certainly in space and astronomy, you would find a large number of Indians working all across the globe.

Somak Raychaudhury: 19:00

That’s because India’s science training, the universities are very, very robust, very good. And so how you train people without any opportunities going around the world. I think that’s what the brain drain is. Now one of the things that struck me most in the Chanryaan-3 launch and then the Aditya-1 launch is that this is the first time you stood done a public exercise in inviting the media into these events.

Somak Raychaudhury: 19:24

Until now many of the activities of ISRO had really not been media friendly. And when I went out there, and in my university students were watching it live on big screens. It was actually on YouTube Live, the most popular ever live programme on YouTube. If you look at the number of people who watched it so far, in the history of YouTube. And you could see that in the streets, you could hear kids celebrating on the streets as if India’s just won a cricket match. You’re hearing that kind of cheers from from the streets of India that itself shows not just that the common people are involved in it, the next generation of students, people who will going to do all this or getting involved in what they see are achievements of Indian science and technology.

Somak Raychaudhury: 20:13

This itself is very, very important and the fact that one actually starts to feel that you can achieve such things in India. I think it’s going to be very important. I mean, the brain drain works in both ways people go to train abroad, but they never come back. And there are a whole generations of students who don’t think that it’s worth studying for higher very technical subjects in India. I think what will happen in the future is that a lot of people will study at Indian universities who want to do this kind of thing will remain in India and not go abroad. And people who have gone abroad for such training will come back.

Jack Leeming: 20:53

Have you noticed that already at Ashoka University?

Somak Raychaudhury: 20:55

Well, one of the reasons we are here at Ashoka university is that we’re trying to build an international university here in India in the private sector; again Indian education has largely been government supported. And in the private sector. Now, Ashoka can actually have an international presence. At Ashoka here I have students from 20 different countries. 20% of my faculty are non-Indian. And this is increasing. And almost all the faculty that I have about 200 faculty on campus, have had their last jobs abroad. So a lot of people who are here who have gone abroad and then come back, and we’re attracting people who are non Indians who want to work in India. And this I think, hopefully, that’s a trend in in academia.

Jack Leeming: 21:44

And that sense of internationalism, that sense of joining the larger international community that comes to these big scientific projects. That’s not just limited to space, I think it’s where India really shines. But I’m sure there’s lots of other projects outside of space science, where it’s happening.

Somak Raychaudhury: 22:00

This is also quite new in Indian science. I mean, I think, again, when when I went to university, Indian science was not part of international science, the big science project. But now, in almost all subjects. I know India’s actually formally at the government level part of large projects. India is part of the fusion energy project ether, which is based in France, in astronomy, there’s part of the Square Kilometre Array and the 30 metre telescope and Gravitational Wave Observatory, LIGO. These are all big projects that involve many, many countries all over the world. And India being part of it, Indian scientists are becoming part of the projects, they’re going around the world, and interacting directly with the international community, but being members of Indian institutions. And this, of course, is a trend in the space industry. And space research is just a part of the whole thing. And so you have to see that in context of India’s growing globalisation of all kinds of academics.

Jack Leeming: 23:03

That’s a real rosy picture of Indian academia and moving into the international community. But are there any sort of pain points? Or is there anywhere that needs to get better?

Somak Raychaudhury: 23:12

I mean, by no means, am I saying that we’ve arrived, I mean, I think there’s still a long way to go. There’s been a tradition of very good university education and research in India, but they’ve been separate. I mean, in India, research happened in research institutions. And teaching happens in universities, very few universities do research. And very few students going to university see research being done. And one of the major things that’s happening in India is to bring the two together. My university, Ashoka, is one of very few universities that has brought together so the people who teach also do research, but in overwhelming fraction of India’s 1000 universities, the faculty don’t do research. So that is one of the important things I mean, even to reverse the brain drain one needs to have students go through a programme of research and teaching at universities. This is the big goal, I think, in kind of re modelling Indian university education that’s happening the national education policy that was unleashed on the country in 2020 talks about this: bringing research and teaching together. This is a big task. India is a large country, the number of colleges and universities is mind boggling. But incidents like successes with the space programme, successes with the the attempts to globalisation, they all help in providing motivation to this much larger system.

Jack Leeming: 24:42

And actually on that, what are your hopes for the future, both for space science and maybe also Indian science in general?

Somak Raychaudhury: 24:48

I have very high hopes for the way things are going. I think one of the major challenges is to as I said, bring research into the universities so that that improves the level of education because people who are creating knowledge in research are also giving that knowledge to the students, then there’s a very ambitious programme going on in bringing women into higher education and science in particular. And this is another big thing. Of course, as I said, the numbers are mind boggling, because half that number are women and the number of women in Indian science is still, particularly away from the major cities is something that needs to be improved. So that’s another big challenge.

Somak Raychaudhury: 25:27

But I think we are just about a generation away from India becoming one of the major leaders in world academics. Already, the number of papers coming out of Indian science is in the top five in the world. Now, the quality of those papers needs to improve. The amount of money that the government spends on Indian higher education is still much much below the average of the countries that are very active in science, that will have to improve. But India is trying very hard to bring actual private money from industry into Indian science and university education, university research. So that will help. So I’m very hopeful that the brain drain problem that we’re talking about will be revised. But also in some key subjects India will become the place where the world’s scientists will come and work.