Chandrayaan-3: India successfully

 Chandrayaan-3: India successfully lands on the Moon's southern pole,

Chandrayaan 3

With its Moon mission becoming the first to set foot near the lunar south pole, India has created history.

With this, India joins the US, the former Soviet Union, and China as the only other nations to successfully conduct a soft landing on the moon.

At 18:04 local time (12:34 GMT), the Vikram lander from Chandrayaan-3 successfully made landfall.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that "India is now on the Moon" as celebrations erupted all throughout the nation.

"We have succeeded where no other nation has. It's a happy occasion," he continued. From South Africa, where he is attending the Brics conference, Mr. Modi was viewing the event live.

Isro, the Indian Space Research OrganizationThe successful landing, according to chairman Sreedhara Panicker Somanath, "is not our work alone; this is the work of a generation of Isro scientists."

A few days have passed since Russia's Luna-25 spacecraft crashed into the Moon after spinning out of control.

The accident also brought attention to how challenging it is to land in the south pole region, where the terrain is "very uneven" and "full of craters and boulders."

India's second lunar mission, which similarly tried to soft-land there in 2019, was a failure. Its lander and rover were destroyed, but its orbiter was still intact.

On Wednesday, stressful moments occurred prior to the touchdown as the lander, named Vikram after Isro founder Vikram Sarabhai, started its perilous fall while carrying the 26-kg Pragyaan rover inside of its belly.

(the Sanskrit term meaning wisdom).

The lander's speed was progressively decreased from 1.68 km/s to virtually 0 km/s, allowing it to land gently on the moon's surface.

The six-wheeled rover will crawl out of the lander's belly in a few hours, once the dust has settled, and travel among the rocks and craters on the Moon's surface, gathering important data and photographs to be returned to Earth.

What will happen to India's Moon mission next?

The search for water-based ice, which could one day enable human habitation on the Moon, is one of the mission's main objectives. Additionally, it might be used to refuel spacecraft traveling to Mars and other far-off planets. The remaining surface area, according to scientistsThere is a sizable area that might house water ice reserves under constant shadow.

Both the lander and the rover are equipped with five scientific equipment that will assist researchers learn more about the Moon's surface's tectonic activity, atmosphere, and physical properties.

An official informed the BBC that the rover is flying the Indian flag and that the Isro logo and insignia are engraved on its wheels to make marks on the lunar surface when it walks on the moon.

Isro officials said Chandrayaan-3, India's third lunar mission, will assist make some "very substantial" scientific discoveries and will aim to expand on the achievements of the prior Moon missions.

Coming in 15 yearsafter Chandrayaan-1, the nation's first Moon mission, which demonstrated that the Moon has an atmosphere during daylight hours and found the presence of water molecules on the barren lunar surface in 2008.

Even though the soft landing attempt failed, Chandrayaan-2 was not a total loss because its orbiter is still circling the Moon and would assist the Vikram lander in sending photographs and data to Earth for study.

There is a rising worldwide interest in the Moon, and many more missions will soon be traveling to its surface, so India is not the only country keeping a watch on it. Additionally, experts claim there is still much to learn about the Moon, which is frequently referred to as a portal to deep space.