A robotic landing craft from India successfully touched down in the southern polar region of the Moon on Wednesday, making the rising space power the fourth nation to achieve a soft landing on the lunar surface.
The Vikram lander from India's Chandrayaan 3 mission landed at approximately 8:33 am EDT (12:33 UTC) after a nail-biting final descent broadcast to the world by India's space agency.
Confirmation of the successful landing triggered a celebration across India, both inside and outside the mission control center in Bangalore. Chandrayaan 3 ends a 47-year drought in successful lunar landings by any country outside China, which has placed three probes on the Moon's surface, including one on the lunar far side, since 2013.
“We have achieved a soft landing on the Moon," said Sreedhara Somanath, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, or ISRO. "India is on the Moon!”
The Vikram lander, measuring more than 6 feet (2 meters) high, launched from India on July 14 with a propulsion module to guide it out of Earth orbit on a course to the Moon. After entering lunar orbit on August 5, the Chandrayaan 3 lander separated from its propulsion section and lined up for its final approach on Wednesday.
The lander began its powered descent to the lunar surface about 20 minutes before touchdown, initially bleeding off speed in a horizontal orientation before pitching over to start a vertical approach to the landing zone. Vikram paused its descent at 2,600 feet (800 meters) and 500 feet (150 meters) to allow on-board cameras to check for boulders or hazards.
The autonomous navigation system then commanded the lander to resume its descent, and the spacecraft settled on the ground with its four landing legs. India's space agency released the first photo from the landing site a few hours later, showing the vehicle standing upright on the Moon's charcoal-color surface.
"The entire mission operations from launch to landing happened flawless, right per the timeline," said P. Veeramuthuvel, ISRO's project director for the Chandrayaan 3 mission.
Bragging rights for India
The arrival of Chandrayaan 3 on the Moon marks a comeback for India after the country's first attempt at a lunar landing failed in 2019. That mission, named Chandrayaan 2, crashed after a cascading series of problems. Higher-than-expected thrust levels from its braking rockets drove the lander off course, and its on-board software was unable to compensate for the error.
India's government immediately started planning a follow-up mission, Chandrayaan 3, with a budget of roughly $90 million. Aside from India's landing failure in 2019, teams from Israel, Japan, and Russia have faltered on recent attempts to reach the lunar surface intact with robotic spacecraft.
"Today, we have achieved what we set out to achieve in 2019," said Muthusamy Sankaran, director of ISRO's satellite center, after Wednesday's landing. "It was delayed by about four years, but we have done it."
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi watched the landing through a video connection from South Africa, where he is attending a summit of the BRICS nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. He said India's successful landing on the Moon was "welcomed universally."
The official broadcast of the landing on ISRO's YouTube channel was watched by roughly 8 million people.
"India’s successful Moon mission is not just India’s alone," Modi said. "This success belongs to all of humanity, and it will help Moon missions by other countries in the future. I’m confident that all countries in the world, including those from the Global South, are capable of achieving such feats."
The leaders of Brazil, India, China, and South Africa are participating in the BRICS summit in person in Johannesburg. Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, spoke to the gathering remotely from Moscow. Putin's travel outside Russia is restricted because he is the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court related to war crimes in Ukraine.
Putin will be spared the potentially uncomfortable prospect of congratulating Modi on the Chandrayaan 3 landing in person. The landing of Chandrayaan 3 came four days after Russia's Luna 25 spacecraft was destroyed when it plummeted to the lunar surface following a botched engine burn.
Luna 25 was the first Russian mission to attempt a landing on the Moon since the Soviet-era Luna 24 mission in 1976. Chandrayaan 3's success, coupled with India's other accomplishments in space, signals it may be time to rethink Russia's ranking among the world's space powers.
India's deep space program has achieved success on the international stage before. The country's first Moon mission, an orbiting Indian-built platform called Chandrayaan 1, found evidence of water ice inside craters at the Moon's south pole in 2009 using a NASA science instrument. The discovery helped spark a new wave of interest in lunar exploration because water ice could be tapped in the future to provide propellant, air, and drinking water for astronauts.
Chandrayaan means "moon craft" in Sanskrit.
India placed a spacecraft into orbit around Mars in 2014, something Russia hasn't done since the fall of the Soviet Union. Indian rockets are now launching more commercial satellites than Russian boosters, particularly after most international satellite operators stopped doing business with Russia following its invasion of Ukraine.
Russia can still boast about its human spaceflight program, which regularly sends cosmonauts to the International Space Station. But Russia is not a partner in NASA's Artemis program to send people back to the Moon later this decade. India recently signed the Artemis Accords, a framework of shared values for space exploration led by the United States, but details about possible Indian contributions to Artemis missions haven't been decided yet.
India, meanwhile, is developing its human-rated crew capsule, called Gaganyaan, which could fly into low-Earth orbit with astronauts in 2025.
“We’ll be now looking at putting a man into space, putting a spacecraft around Venus, and landing a craft at Mars," said Sankaran, who heads one of ISRO's most important space centers. "All these activities have been going on for a few years, and this success today will inspire us... to take those efforts even more strongly so that we will make our country proud again and again and again.”
12 days of exploration
India's Vikram lander is now operating on the near side of the Moon at about 69 degrees south latitude, closer to the lunar south pole than any prior mission. All of NASA's Apollo missions, which had astronauts, explored locations closer to the Moon's equator, as have China's robotic landing vehicles. But the Vikram lander didn't land far enough south to explore permanently shadowed craters where vast deposits of water ice may be present.
Sometime in the next few hours, Chandrayaan 3's Vikram lander will extend a ramp to deploy a small rover named Pragyan. The solar-powered mobile robot will "carry out in-situ chemical analysis of the lunar surface," India's space agency said. The lander is designed to function for about 12 days, the remaining amount of daylight at the landing site. Once the sun sets, the spacecraft will be robbed of its power source and temperatures will fall to fatal levels for the lander's electronics.
Vikram's science instruments include a thermophysical experiment to measure the thermal conductivity and temperature at the landing site, a seismic sensor, and a Langmuir probe to measure plasma density. NASA also supplied a passive laser retroreflector array on the Vikram lander for future lunar ranging measurements.
“We have achieved our goal flawlessly from the day we started rebuilding our spacecraft after the Chandrayaan 2 experience," said Kalpana Kalahasti, ISRO's associate project director for Chandrayaan 3. "It has been breathe in, breathe out, Chandrayaan 3 for our team.”
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated India on Wednesday's achievement.
"Congratulations ISRO on your successful Chandrayaan 3 lunar South Pole landing!" Nelson posted on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. "And congratulations to India on being the 4th country to successfully soft-land a spacecraft on the Moon. We’re glad to be your partner on this mission!"
