planetary · Completed
Chandrayaan-3
The soft landing that made India the fourth nation to reach the lunar surface, and the first to touch down near the Moon's south pole.
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Chandrayaan-3 set the Vikram lander down at 69.37°S on 23 August 2023, in terrain that no mission had previously attempted. The south polar highlands are of interest precisely because they are difficult: permanently shadowed craters there may hold water ice preserved for billions of years.
The Pragyan rover covered 101 metres over one lunar day. Its Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer measured a composition at the landing site that ties the region to ALHA 81005, the first lunar meteorite recovered on Earth: an unexpectedly direct link between a rock in a laboratory and the ground it came from.
The lander’s RAMBHA-LP instrument returned the first in-situ measurements of the near-surface lunar plasma at these latitudes, and a commanded “hop” experiment lifted Vikram roughly 40 cm and set it back down, demonstrating the thrust control that a future sample-return ascent would require.