ISRO bags Leif Erikson Prize

• ISRO has been awarded the 2023 Leif Erikson Lunar Prize by the Exploration Museum in Iceland’s Husavik for its successful Chandrayaan-3 mission.
• The award celebrates the first soft-landing of a spacecraft near the lunar south pole and “ISRO’s indomitable spirit in advancing lunar exploration and contributing to understanding celestial mysteries,”.

ABOUT LEIF ERIKSON AWARD

• The Leif Erikson Award is an annual prize given by the Exploration Museum since 2015.
• It is named after Leif Erikson — a Norse explorer thought to be the first European to set foot on continental America, almost four centuries before the expedition of Christopher Columbus.

ABOUT ISRO

• ISRO, previously the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR), was set up in 1962.
• Later, on August 15, 1969, ISRO superseded INCOSPAR and was subsequently brought under Dept of Space in 1972.
• It is the national space agency of India.
• It operates as the primary research and development arm of the Department of Space (DoS), which is directly overseen by the Prime Minister of India while the Chairman of ISRO also acts as the executive of DoS.
• Headquarters- Bengaluru

ABOUT CHANDRAYAAN-3

• Chandrayaan-3 was India’s third mission to the moon, and the second attempt to carry out a soft-landing on the lunar surface.
• ISRO managed to place the Vikram lander on the lunar surface and roll out the robotic rover, Pragyaan.
• Both instruments collected data and beamed it back to Earth for 15 days — before being put to sleep as the lunar night set in.
• Additionally, the Spectro-polarimetry of HAbitable Planet Earth (SHAPE) payload — which is meant to observe the Earth — operated from within the propulsion module of the spacecraft.