“India is on the Moon!” declared Sreedhara Somanath, chair of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), today to a packed mission control room. At 6:04 p.m. local time, the Chandrayaan-3 mission softly deposited the Vikram lander on the Moon’s surface, making India the fourth nation to succeed at the task after the United States, the Soviet Union, and China. India also becomes the first nation to land near the lunar south pole, an uncharted territory thought to contain frozen water that could support future human exploration.
Millions of Indians were glued to TV sets and mobile phones to watch the live telecast of the landing. When the news of success arrived, a palpable sense of euphoria and pride engulfed the nation. Scientists at ISRO headquarters hugged each other, smiling and dancing.
The mission is a vindication for ISRO, after its first landing attempt in 2019 with Chandrayaan-2 ended with a crash because of software errors.
The feat also elevates India’s status as a space power in an increasingly crowded field of nations eager to demonstrate their technological prowess. Earlier this month, Russia launched its Luna 25 mission, and it was supposed to reach the lunar south pole region a few days before Chandrayaan-3. But on 19 August, Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, said attempts to establish contact with Luna 25 had failed and it had concluded that the spacecraft had collided with the lunar surface.
India’s Moon program began with the 2008 Chandrayaan-1 mission. It carried a NASA instrument that identified signatures of water ice on the surface of the Moon—faint whiffs at midlatitudes that increased at higher, polar latitudes. Researchers believe interactions between the solar wind and surface rocks can create water molecules that hop to the poles, where they can accumulate and persist in permanently shadowed craters.
Hours after touchdown, the Vikram lander began to release a six-wheeled rover called Pragyan. Solar powered, the 26-kilogram, suitcase-size rover will have at least 2 weeks to explore the Moon’s surface. The lander and rover carry instruments that will study the composition of the lunar soil and probe for water and ice, while listening for small seismic tremors.
“For India this is a scientific and technology demonstration mission,” says Ajey Lele, a consultant with the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. “Chandrayaan-1 was able to find water on the Moon, and now India is making an attempt to know more about it.”
Chandrayaan-3 kicks off a flurry of missions aiming to land on the Moon. Later this week, Japan plans on launching a Moon lander, and later this year NASA will launch the first mission in its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. In 2024, China plans to build on its successful Chang’e program with a mission to collect and return rock samples from the lunar far side.
