From SohajPedia, the daily world briefing
Chandrayaan-3
On 23 August 2023, at 6:04 in the evening Indian time, a machine built in Bengaluru settled onto the dust near the Moon's south pole — a place no lander had ever reached softly. Chandrayaan-3 made India the fourth country to land on the Moon, and the first to do it in the south polar region, the most sought-after real estate in modern space exploration.
From launch to landing
The mission
Chandrayaan-3 was, in essence, a second attempt. Its predecessor, Chandrayaan-2, had carried an orbiter that worked beautifully — and a lander that crashed in the final kilometres of descent in 2019. So ISRO kept the design lean: no orbiter of its own this time, just a propulsion module to ferry the stack to lunar orbit, the Vikram lander, and the small Pragyan rover tucked inside it. The rocket, an LVM3, lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota on 14 July 2023, and the spacecraft entered lunar orbit on 5 August, spending days tightening its path before the descent.
The landing
The final descent lasted roughly a quarter of an hour and was fully automatic — the Moon is close, but not close enough for joystick control from Earth. Vikram fired its engines, braked from orbital speed, hovered to scan the ground, and touched down at about 69 degrees south latitude. In the control room in Bengaluru, applause; across India, an audience of millions who had watched the live stream. The landing site was later named Shiv Shakti Point. Pragyan rolled down its ramp hours later, leaving tracks — and, in its wheel treads, imprints of ISRO's logo — in soil no rover had touched before.
Why the south pole?
Because of what may be buried there. Craters near the lunar south pole contain floors that sunlight has not reached for billions of years, and evidence from earlier orbiters points to water ice in that permanent shadow. Water on the Moon is not just a curiosity: it can be drunk, breathed, and — split into hydrogen and oxygen — burned as rocket fuel. Every major space agency now has the polar regions in its plans; India simply got there first with a soft landing, and did it, as ISRO officials noted with pride, on a budget smaller than many space films.
What it left behind
Vikram and Pragyan were built to work for one lunar day — about fourteen Earth days — before the freezing lunar night. In that window the rover roamed near the landing site (the photograph at the top of this article is its portrait of the lander, taken from 15 metres away) and the pair ran their instruments on the soil and the thin lunar exosphere. When the night came, both fell silent, and attempts to wake them at the next sunrise produced nothing. The mission had already done what it came for: it turned the heartbreak of 2019 into a landing the whole world watched.
Frequently asked questions
See also
References
Photograph: the Vikram lander imaged by the Pragyan rover, via Wikimedia Commons.