The Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft successfully landed on the moon on Wednesday, a mission seen as crucial to lunar exploration and the country’s standing as a space power.

ISRO confirmed the landing in a post of X, formerly known as Twitter.

“Chandrayaan-3 has successfully soft-landed on the moon,” it wrote.

India’s mission - Chandrayaan means “moon vehicle” in Hindi and Sanskrit - is its second attempt to land there. In 2019, ISRO’s Chandrayaan-2 mission successfully deployed an orbiter but its lander crashed.

The Chandrayaan-3 is expected to remain functional for two weeks, running a series of experiments including a spectrometer analysis of the mineral composition of the lunar surface.

India is now among the few nations that have successfully made a soft landing on the moon. Russia, China, and the United States were the only three countries to have achieved the milestone.

More to follow…