The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is waiting to hear again from Chandrayaan-3 Vikram Lander and Pragyan Rover, the principal investigators of instruments which landed successfully on the moon, the two have begun sifting through data for new findings.

Before they went to sleep, many things the global scientific community learnt from from Vikram and Pragyan’s work and this new knowledge about the lunar soil will be useful for future missions, including ambitious projects aiming to send humans back to Moon.

“It would have been easy if there was a way we could know if they would wake up, but we have to wait and see how systems behave after Sunrise,” Isro chairman S Somanath said.

The Sunrise on Moon is expected today, the Sun elevation angle will be at 0° early in the day and reach a maximum of around 13° angle by the end of the day.

“The optimal Sun elevation angle for systems to work would be 6° to 9°. But the temperature has to rise above a certain threshold. For the wake up, we need power generation and temperature on the elements on Vikram and Pragyan to meet certain criteria. We should know something by September 21 or 22. If they wake up, it’ll wake up during this time,” M Sankaran, director, UR Rao Satellite Centre, the Chandrayaan-3 lead centre, told TOI.

Waking of Vikram Lander and Pragyan Rover will be bonus for scientists, and that the data the two have sent when they were awake is expected to give new information given that all earlier in situ experiments were carried out in the equatorial region of the Moon.

“Lot of data has been collected but outcomes will take several months, even a couple of years. There is anticipation that our data would lead to some new things. And if systems wake up again, there’ll be more data, which is good,” Sankaran added as reported by the TimesofIndia.