The Indian Space Research Organization, or IRSO, launched Chandrayaan-3 over a month ago with the goal landing near the lunar south pole to become the fourth country to land a spacecraft on the moon.
The spacecraft made a successful landing about 8:33 a.m. ET Wednesday morning. You can watch live at the embed at the top of the page.
Chandrayaan-3, the word for “moon craft” in Sanskrit, took off from a launchpad in Sriharikota in southern India in July with an orbiter, a lander and a rover, in a demonstration of India’s emerging space technology.
The successful landing makes India the fourth country — after the United States, the former Soviet Union, and China — to achieve the feat.
The successful landing comes less than a week after the crash of Luna-25, a lunar lander from Russia that was set to land in the same region of the moon as the Chandrayaan-3.
The six-wheeled lander and rover module of Chandrayaan-3 is configured with payloads that would provide data to the scientific community on the properties of lunar soil and rocks, including chemical and elemental compositions, said Dr. Jitendra Singh, junior minister for Science and Technology.
DIG DEEPER:Chandrayaan-3 attempt India’s first moon landing after Russian Luna-25 crash
India’s previous attempt to land a robotic spacecraft near the moon’s little-explored south pole ended in failure in 2019. It entered the lunar orbit but lost touch with its lander that crashed while making its final descent to deploy a rover to search for signs of water. According to a failure analysis report submitted to the ISRO, the crash was caused by a software glitch.
Contributing: The Associated Press
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