India has become the fourth country to achieve a soft landing on the moon. CNBC reports:
India staked a new claim as a national superpower in space on Wednesday, landing its Chandrayaan-3 mission safely on the moon’s unexplored south pole.
The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft launched last month and touched down on the lunar surface around 8:34 a.m. ET.
The feat makes India the fourth country to land on the moon, and the first to land on one of the moon’s lunar poles. Previously, Russia (then the Soviet Union), the U.S. and China landed spacecraft successfully on the moon.
The lunar south pole has emerged as a place of exploration interest thanks to recent discoveries of traces of water ice on the moon. India previously attempted a lunar south pole landing in September 2019, but a software failure caused the Chandrayaan-2 mission to crash into the surface.
″[The south pole is] really a very interesting, historical, scientific and geologic area that a lot of countries are trying to get at that can serve as a base for future exploration,” Wendy Cobb, professor of strategy and security studies at the U.S. Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, told CNBC.
Cobb added that the discovery of water on the south pole of the moon is “really important for future exploration,” as it could serve as a source of fuel for rockets and spacecraft.
In other good news, reports The Times of India, fewer Indian children are growing up hungry, and the percentage of children who are stunted has fallen from 42% to 32%:
There were 16 million fewer stunted children in India in 2022 than in 2012, according to the 2023 edition of the ‘Joint Malnutrition Estimate JME) released by Unicef, WHO and the World Bank…Stunting is the result of poor nutrition in utero and during early childhood. Children suffering from stunting may never attain their full possible height and their brains may never develop to their full cognitive potential. Therefore, dealing with stunting is seen as critical in the fight against malnutrition.
Thanks to innovations in agriculture, such as the Green Revolution, malnutrition in recent years has been at its lowest level ever worldwide. The agronomist Norman Borlaug, who pioneered the Green Revolution, saved perhaps a billion lives in the Third World by developing high-yield, disease-resistant crops through biotechnology. For this, he received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Medal of Honor. Yet he was smeared in the left-wing magazine The Nation, which had an irrational phobia of biotechnology, as being “the biggest killer of all.”
