Why did Chandrayaan-3 land on the near side of the moon?

Last Updated28/08/2023

The controlled descent of the Vikram lander of Chandrayaan-3 made it one of the closest approaches of a lunar mission to the moon’s South Pole.
However, like most of the lunar-landing missions before, Vikram too landed on the near side.
This makes the Chinese Chang’e 4 mission the only one to have landed on the far side.

The near side refers to the portion of the moon (about 60%) that is visible to us.
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.
However this doesn’t imply that half of the moon is in perpetual darkness.
The ‘new moon’ is the time when the other ‘far side’ of the moon 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 near side is relatively smoother and has many more ‘maria’ or large volcanic plains compared to the far side.
On the far side, there are huge craters, thousands of kilometres wide, which have likely resulted from collisions with asteroids.
The crust on the near side is thinner because of which, over millions of years, the volcanic lava in the lunar crust has flowed more extensively into the thinner side and filled up its craters.
The resulting plains that have thus formed are far more conducive to space missions.

Chandrayaan-3 identified an area that had spots of 150 m spaces that would be conducive to a safe descent.
The Chandrayaan-3 mission, while still on the near side, has managed to land Vikram the closest ever to the lunar South Pole.
Landing on the far side would have meant no direct, line-of-sight communication with the Earth, necessary for regular near-real-time updates.