Chandrayaan-3, India becomes first country to land on south pole of Moon

India achieved a historic first by landing the Lander Module (LM) of Chandrayaan 3 on the rough, cold (temperatures can go down to minus 230 degrees centigrade) and dark terrain of the South Pole of the Moon. A distance of 388,545 kilometres from Earth.

At 6.04pm on Wednesday, India scripted history by becoming the no 1 nation to land the ISRO Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft on the Moon's south pole, days after a Russian probe Luna-25 crashed in the same region.

Chandrayaan-3, which means “Mooncraft” in



Sanskrit, touched down near the little-explored lunar south pole. A previous Indian effort – Chandrayaan-2 – failed in 2019.

The solar-powered rover ‘Pragyaan’ will explore the surface and transmit data to Earth over its two-week lifespan.

Chandrayaan-3 took much longer to reach the Moon than the Apollo missions in the 1960s and 1970s, which arrived in a matter of days.

The solar-powered rover will explore the surface and transmit data to Earth over its two-week lifespan.